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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



I 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD 



AND OTHER SERMONS. 



THE 



CANDLE OF THE LORD 



Slnti (BU)n giermons 



BY THE 



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REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS 



RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 




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NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

1881 



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Copyright J 1881, 
By E. p. Button and Company. 



University Press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. 



Sermon Page 

I. The Candle of the Lord ...... 1 

"The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." — 
Prov. XX. 27. 

11. The Joy of Self-saceifice 22 

"And when the burnt offering began, the song of 
the Lord began also with the trumpets." — 2 Chron. 
xxix. 27. 

III. The Young and Old Christian .... 39 

" The good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush." — 
Deut. xxxiii. 16. 

IV. The Pillar in God's Temple 60 

"Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the 
Temple of my God, and he shall go no more out; 
and I will write upon him the name of my God, and 
the name of the city of my God, . . . and my new 
name." — Rey. iii. 12. 

V. The Eye of the Soul 74 

" The light of the body is the eye. If therefore 
thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of 
light." — Matt. vi. 22. 

VI. The Man of Macedonia 91 

" And a vision appeared unto Parul in the night : 
There stood a man of Macedonia and prayed him, 
saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us." — 
Acts xvi. 9. 



VI CONTEXTS. 

Sekmon Page 

VII. The Symmetry of Life 110 

" The length and the breadth and the height of it 
are equal.'" — Rev. xxi. 16. 

VIII. How MAXY Loaves have Ye? .... 127 

"And Jesus saith unto them, How many loaves 
have ye ? " — Matt. xv. 34. 

IX. The Need of Self-eespect (a Thanks- 
giving Sermon) 147 

"And he said, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, 
and I will speak to thee." — Ezek. ii. 1. 

X. The Heroism of Foreig:n^ Missions . . 163 

** As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the 
Holy Ghost said. Separate me Barnabas and Saul 
for the work whereunto I have called them. And 
when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands 
on them, they sent them away.'' — Acts xiii. 2, 3. 

XL The Law of Liberty 183 

" So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be 
judged by the law of liberty." — James ii. 12. 

XII. Fastij^g (a Sermon for Lent) ..... 200 

'' Moreover, when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites, 
of a sad countenance. . . . That thou appear not 
unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in 
secret." — Mat. vi. 16, 18. 

XIII. A Whitsunday Sermon 217 

"And they said unto him, We have not so 
much as heard whether there be any Holy 
Gliost." — Acts xix. 2. 

XIV. Christ the Food of Man 232 

" The Jews therefore strove among themselves, 
saying, How can this man give us his flesh to 
eat ? " — John vi. 52. 



CONTENTS. vii 

Sermon Page 

XV. The Manliness of Christ 253 

*' Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh 
and bones, as ye see me have." — Luke xxiv. 39. 

XVI. Help feom the Hills 270 

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from 
whence cometh my help." — Psalm cxxi. 1. 

XVII. The Cuese of Meroz 287 

" Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of the Lord, 
curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because 
they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help 
of the Lord against the mighty." — Judges v. 23. 

XVHI. The Mystery of Light (a Sermon for 

Trinity Sunday) 805 

" Who coverest Thyself with light as with a gar- 
ment." — Psalm civ. 2. 

XIX. The Accumulation of Faith .... 320 

" Behold, he smote the rock, that the water 
gushed out, and the streams overflowed. Can he 
give bread also? Can he provide flesh for his 
people V — Psalm Ixxviii. 20. 

XX. Christian Charity 336 

" And there came a traveller unto the rich man ; 
and he spared to take of his own flock and his own 
herd to dress for the wayfaring man that was come 
unto him." — 2 Samuel xii. 4. 

XXI. The Marks of the Lord Jesus . . . 355 

" Prom henceforth let no man trouble me, 
for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord 
Jesus.'' — Gal. vi. 17. 



SERMONS. 



I. 

THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 

** The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." — Pro v. xx. 27. 

The essential connection between the life of God and 
the life of man is the great truth of the world ; and that 
is the truth which Solomon sets forth in the striking 
words which I have chosen for my text this morning. 
The picture which the words suggest is very simple. 
An unlighted candle is standing in the darkness and some 
one comes to light it. A blazing bit of paper holds the 
fire at first, but it is vague and fitfuL It flares and wavers 
and at any moment may go out. But the vague, uncer- 
tain, flaring blaze touches the candle, and the candle 
catches fire and at once you have a steady flame. It 
burns straight and clear and constant. The candle gives 
the fire a manifestation-point for all the room which is 
illuminated by it. The candle is glorified by the fire 
and the fire is manifested by the candle. The two bear 
witness that they were made for one another by the way 
in which they fulfil each other's life. That fulfilment 
comes by the way in which the inferior substance renders 
obedience to its superior. The candle obeys the fire. 
The docile wax acknowledges that the subtle flame is 
its master and it yields to his power ; and so, like every 



2 THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 

faithful servant of a noble master, it at once gives its 
master's nobility the chance to utter itself, and its own 
substance is clothed with a glory which is not its own. 
The disobedient granite, if you try to burn it, neither 
gives the fire a chance to show its brightness nor gathers 
any splendor to itself. It only glows with sullen resist- 
ance, and, as the heat increases, splits and breaks but 
wdll not yield. But the candle obeys, and so in it the 
scattered fire finds a point of permanent and clear ex- 
pression. 

Can we not see, with such a picture clear before us, 
what must be meant when it is said that one being is 
the candle of another being ? There is in a community 
a man of large, rich character, whose influence runs 
everywhere. You cannot talk with any man in all the 
city but you get, shown in that man's own way, the 
thought, the feeling of that central man who teaches all 
the community to think, to feel. The very boys catch 
something of his power, and have something about them 
that would not be there if he were not living in the town. 
What better description could you give of allthat, than 
to say that that man's life was fire and that all these 
men's lives were candles which he lighted, which gave 
to the rich, warm, live, fertile nature that was in him 
multiplied points of steady exhibition, so that he lighted 
the town through them ? Or, not to look so widely, I 
pity you if in the circle of your home there is not some 
w^arm and living nature which is your fire. Your cold, 
dark candle-nature, touched by that fire, burns bright 
and clear. Wherever you are carried, perhaps into re- 
gions where that nature cannot go, you carry its fire and 
set it up in some new place. Nay, the fire itself may have 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 3 

disappeared, the nature may have vanished from the earth 
and gone to heaven ; and yet still your candle-life, which 
was lighted at it, keeps that fire still in the world, as the 
fire of the lightning lives in the tree that it has struck, 
long after the quick lightning itself has finished its 
short, hot life and died. So the man in the counting- 
room is the candle of the woman who stays at home, 
making her soft influence felt in the rough places of 
trade where her feet never go ; and so a man who lives 
like an inspiration in the city for honesty and purity 
and charity may be only the candle in whose obedient 
life burns still the fire of another strong, true man who 
was his father, and who passed out of men's sight a 
score of years ago. Men call the father dead, but he is 
no more dead than the torch has gone out which lighted 
the beacon that is blazing on the hill. 

And now, regarding all this lighting of life from life, 
two things are evident, the same two which appeared 
in the story of the candle and its flame : First, there 
must be a correspondency of* nature between the two ; 
and second, there must be a cordial obedience of the 
less to the greater. The nature which cannot feel the 
other nature's- warmth, even if it is held close to it ; and 
the nature which refuses to be held where the other 
nature's flame can reach it, — both of these must go un- 
lighted, no matter how hotly the fire of the higher life 
may burn. 

I think that we are ready now to turn to Solomon 
and read his words again and understand them. '' The 
spirit of man is the candle of the Lord," he says. God 
is the fire of this world, its vital principle, a warm per- 
vading presence everywhere. What thing of outward 



4 THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 

nature can so picture to us the mysterious, the subtle, 
the quick, live, productive and destructive thought, which 
has always lifted men's hearts and solemnized their faces 
when they have said the word GOD, as this strange 
thing, — so heavenly, so unearthly, so terrible, and yet so 
gracious ; so full of creativeness, and yet so quick and 
fierce to sweep whatever opposes it out of its path, — this 
marvel, this beauty and glory and mystery of fire ? Men 
have always felt the fitness of the figure ; and the fire 
has always crowded, closest of all earthly elements, about 
the throne on which their conception of Deity was seated. 
And now of this fire the spirit of man is the candle. 
What does that mean ? If, because man is of a nature 
which corresponds to the nature of God, and just so far 
as man is obedient to God, the life of God, which is 
spread throughout the universe, gathers itself into utter- 
ance ; and men, aye, and all other beings, if such beings 
there are, capable of watching our humanity, see what 
God is, in gazing at the man whom He has kindled, — . 
then is not the figure plain ? It is a wondrous thought, 
but it is clear enough. Here is the universe, full of the 
diffused fire of divinity. Men feel it in the air, as they 
feel an intense heat which has not broken into a blaze. 
That is the meaning of a great deal of the unexplained, 
mysterious awfulness of life, of which they who are very 
much in its power are often only half aware. It is the 
sense of God, felt but unseen, like an atmosphere bur- 
dened with heat that does not burst out into fire, ^ow 
in the midst of this solemn, burdened world there stands 
up a man, pure, God-like, and perfectly obedient to God. 
In an instant it is as if the heated room had found some 
sensitive, inflammable point where it could kindle to a 



THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 5 

blaze. The vague oppressiveness of God's felt presence 
becomes clear and definite. The fitfulness of the im- 
pression of divinity is steadied into permanence. The 
mystery changes its character, and is a mystery of light 
and not of darkness. The fire of the Lord has found 
the candle of the Lord, and burns clear and steady, 
guiding and cheering instead of bewildering and fright- 
ening us, just so soon as a man who is obedient to 
God has begun to catch and manifest His nature. 

I hope that we shall find that this truth comes very 
close to our personal, separate lives ; but, before we come 
to that, let me remind you first with what a central 
dignity it clothes the life of man in the great world. 
Certain philosophies, which belong to our time, would 
depreciate the importance of man in the world, and rob 
him of his centralness. Man's instinct and man's pride 
rebel against them, but he is puzzled by their specious- 
ness. Is it indeed true, as it seems, that the world is 
made for man, and that from man, standing in the centre, 
all things besides which the world contains get their 
true value and receive the verdict of their destiny ? 
That was the old story that the Bible told. The book 
of Genesis with its Garden of Eden, and its obedient 
beasts waiting until the man should tell them what they 
should be called, struck firmly, at the beginning of the 
anthem of the world's history, the great note of the cen- 
tralness of man. And the Garden of Eden, in this its 
first idea, repeats itself in every cabin of the western 
forests or the southern jungles, where a new Adam and 
a new Eve, a solitary settler and his wife, begin as it 
were the huma,n history anew. There once again the 
note of Genesis is struck, and man asserts his central- 



6 THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 

ness. The forest waits to catch the color of his life. 
The beasts hesitate in fear or anger till he shall tame 
them to his service or bid them depart. The earth under 
his feet holds its fertility at his command, and answers 
the summons of his grain or flower-seeds. The very sky 
over his head regards him, and wliat he does upon the 
earth is echoed in the changes of the climate and the 
haste or slowness of the storms. This is the great im- 
pression which all the simplest life of man is ever 
creating, and with which the philosophies, which would 
make little of the separateness and centralness of the 
life of man, must always have to fight. And this is 
the impression which is taken up and strengthened and 
made clear, and turned from a petty pride to a lofty 
dignity and a solemn responsibility, when there comes 
such a message as this of Solomon's. He says that the 
true separateness and superiority and centralness of man 
is in that likeness of nature to God, and that capacity 
of spiritual obedience to Him, in virtue of w^hich man 
may be the declaration and manifestation of God to all 
the world. So long as that truth stands, the centralness 
of man is sure. " The spirit of man is the candle of the 
Lord." 

This is the truth of which I wish to speak to you 
to-day, the perpetual revelation of God by human life. 
You must ask yourself first, what God is. You must 
see how at the very bottom of His existence, as you 
conceive of it, lie these two thoughts — purpose and 
righteousness ; how absolutely impossible it is to give 
God any personality except as the fulfilment of these 
two qualities — the intelligence that plans in love, and 
the righteousness that lives in duty. Then ask yourself 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 7 

how any knowledge of these qualities — of w^hat they are, 
of what kind of being they will make in their perfect 
combination — could exist upon the earth if there were 
not a human nature here in which they could be uttered, 
from which they could shine. Only a person can truly 
utter a person. Only from a character can a character 
be echoed. You might write it all over the skies that 
God was just, but it would not burn there. It would 
be, at best, only a bit of knowledge ; never a Gospel ; 
never something which it would gladden the hearts of 
men to know. That comes only when a human life, 
capable of a justice like God's, made just by God, glows 
with His justice in the eyes of men, a candle of the Lord. 
I have just intimated one thing which we need to 
observe. Man's utterance of God is purely an utterance 
of quality. It can tell me nothing of the quantities 
which make up His perfect life. That God is just, and 
what it is to be just — those things I can learn from the 
just lives of the just men about me ; but how just God 
is, to what unconceived perfection, to what unexpected 
developments of itself, that majestic quality of justice 
may extend in Him, — of that I can form no judgment, 
that is worth anything, from the justice that I see in 
fellow-man. This seems to me to widen at once the 
range of the truth which I am stating. If it be the 
quality of God which man is capable of uttering, then 
it must be the quality of manhood that is necessary for 
the utterance ; the quality of manhood, but not any 
specific quantity, not any assignable degree of human 
greatness. Whoever has in him the human quality, 
whoever really has the spirit of man, may be a candle 
of the Lord. A larger measure of that spirit may make 



8 THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 

a brighter light; but there must be a light wherever 
any human being, in virtue of his humanness, by obe- 
dience becomes luminous with God. There are the men 
of lofty spiritual genius, the leaders of our race. How 
they stand out through history ! How all men feel as 
they pass into their presence that they are passing into 
the light of God ! They are puzzled when they try to 
explain it. There is nothing more instructive and sug- 
gestive than the bewilderment which men feel when 
they try to tell what inspiration is, — how men become 
inspired. The lines which they draw through the con- 
tinual communication between God and man are always 
becoming unsteady and confused. But in general, he 
who comes into the presence of any powerful nature, 
whose power is at all of a spiritual sort, feels sure that 
in some way he is coming into the presence of God. 
But it would be melancholy if only the great men could 
give us this conviction. The world w^ould be darker 
than it is if every human spirit, so soon as it became 
obedient, did not become the Lord's candle. A poor, 
meagre, starved, bruised life, if only it keeps the true 
human quality and does not become inhuman, and if it 
is obedient to God in its blind, dull, half-conscious way, 
becomes a light. Lives yet more dark than it is, become 
dimly aware of God through it. A mere child, in his 
pure humanity, and with his easy and instinctive turn- 
ing of his life toward the God from whom he came, — 
it is one of the commonplaces of your homes how often 
he may burn with some suggestion of divinity, and cast 
illumination upon problems and mysteries whose diffi- 
culty he himself has never felt. There are great lamps 
and little lamps burning everywhere. The world is 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 9 

bright with them. You shut your book in which you 
have been holding communion with one of the great 
souls of all time ; and while you are standing in the 
light which he has shed about him, your child beside 
you says some simple, childlike thing, and a new thread 
of shining wisdom runs through the sweet and subtle 
thoughts that the great thinker gave you, as the light 
of a little taper sends its special needle of brightness 
through the pervasive splendor of a sunlit world. It is 
not strange. The fire is the same, whatever be the 
human lamp that gives it its expression. There is no 
life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human 
and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of 
His light. There is no life so meagre that the greatest 
and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot 
know at all at what sudden moment it may flash forth 
with the life of God. 

And in this truth of ours we have certainly the key 
to another mystery which sometimes puzzles us. What 
shall we make of some man rich in attainments and in 
generous desires, well educated, well behaved, who has 
trained himself to be a light and help to other men, and 
who, now that his training is complete, stands in the 
midst of his fellow-men completely dark and helpless ? 
There are plenty of such men. We have all known 
them who have seen how men grow up. Their breth- 
ren stand around them expecting light from them, but 
no light comes. They themselves are full of amaze- 
ment at themselves. They built themselves for influ- 
ence, but no one feels them. They kindled themselves 
to give light, but no one shines a grateful answer back 
to them. Perhaps they blame their fellow-men, who 



10 THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 

are too dull to see their radiance. Perhaps they only 
wonder what is the matter, and wait, with a hope that 
never quite dies out into despair, for the long-delayed 
recognition and gratitude. At last they die, and tlie 
men who stand about their graves feel that the saddest 
thing about their death is that the world is not percep- 
tibly the darker for their dying. What does it mean ? 
If we let the truth of Solomon's figure play upon it, is 
not the meaning of the familiar failure simply this : 
These men are unlighted candles ; they are the spirit of 
man, elaborated, cultivated, finished to its very finest, 
but lacking the last touch of God. As dark as a row 
of silver lamps, all chased and wrought with wondrous 
skill, all filled with rarest oil, but all untouched with 
fire, — so dar'k in this world is a long row of cultivated 
men, set up along the corridors of some age of history, 
around the halls of some wise university, or in the pul- 
pits of some stately church, to whom there has come no 
fire of devotion, who stand in awe and reverence before 
no wisdom greater than their own, who are proud and 
selfish, who do not know what it is to obey. There is 
the explanation of your wonder when you cling close to 
some man whom the world calls bright, and find that 
you get no brightness from him. There is the explana- 
tion of yourself, puzzled man, who never can make 
out why the world does not turn to you for help. The 
poor blind world cannot tell its need, nor analyze its 
instinct, nor say why it seeks one man and leaves an- 
other; but through its blind eyes it knows when the 
fire of God has fallen on a human life. This is the 
meaning of the strange helpfulness which comes into a 
man when he truly is converted. It is not new truth 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 11 

that he knows, not new wonders that he can do, but 
it is that the unlighted nature, in the utter .obedience 
and self-surrender of that great hour, has been lifted up 
and lighted at the life of God, and now burns with Him. 
But it is not the worst thing in life for a man to be 
powerless or uninfluential. There are men enough for 
whom we would thank God if they did no harm, even 
if they did no good. I will not stop now to question 
whether there be such a thing possible as a life totally 
without influence of any kind, whether perhaps the men 
of whom I have been speaking do not also belong to the 
class of whom I want next to speak. However that 
may be, I am sure you will recognize the fact that there 
is a multitude of men whose lamps are certainly not 
dark, and yet who certainly are not the candles of the 
Lord. A nature furnished richly to the very brim, a 
man of knowledge, of wit, of skill, of thought, with the 
very graces of the body perfect, and yet profane, im- 
pure, worldly, and scattering scepticism of all good and 
truth about him wherever he may go. His is no un- 
lighted candle. He burns so bright and lurid that often 
the purer lights grow dim in the glare. But if it be 
possible for the human candle, when it is all made, when 
the subtle components of a human nature are all mingled 
most carefully, — if it be possible that then, instead of 
being lifted up to heaven and kindled at the pure being 
of Him who is eternally and absolutely good, it should 
be plunged down into hell and lighted at the yellow 
flames that burn out of the dreadful brimstone of the 
pit, then we can understand the sight of a man who is 
rich in every brilliant human quality, cursing the world 
with the continual exhibition of the devilish instead of 



12 THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 

the godlike in his life. When the power of pure love 
appears a^ a capacity of brutal lust ; when the holy in- 
genuity with which man may search the character of a 
fellow-man, that he may help him to be his best, is 
turned into the unholy skill with which the bad man 
studies his victim, that he may know how to make his 
damnation most complete; when the almost divine 
magnetism, which is given to a man in order that he 
may instil his faith and hope into some soul that trusts 
him, is used to breathe doubt and despair through all 
the substance of a friend's reliant soul ; when wit, which 
ought to make truth beautiful, is deliberately prostituted 
to the service of a lie ; when earnestness is degraded to 
be the slave of blasphemy, and the slave's reputation is 
made the cloak for the master's shame, — in all these 
cases, and how frequent they are no man among us fails 
to know, you have simply the spirit of man kindled 
from below, not from above, the candle of the Lord 
burning with the fire of the devil. Still it will burn ; 
still the native inflammableness of humanity will show 
itself. There will be light ; there will be power ; and 
men who want nothing but light and power will come 
to it. It is wonderful how mere power, or mere bright- 
ness, apart altogether from the work that the power is 
doing and the story that the brightness has to tell, will 
win the confidence and admiration of men from whom 
we might have expected better things. A bright book 
or a bright • play will draw the crowd, although its 
meaning be detestable. A clever man will make a 
host of boys and men stand like charmed birds while he 
draws their principles quietly out of them and leaves 
them moral idiots. A whole great majority of a com- 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 13 

munity will rush like foolish sheep to the polls and 
vote for a man who they know is false and brutal, be- 
cause they have learned to say that he is strong. All 
this is true enough ; and yet while men do these wild 
and foolish things, they know the difference between the 
illumination of a human life that is kindled from above 
and that which is kindled from below. They know the 
pure flames of one and the lurid glare of the other ; and 
however they may praise and follow wit and power, as 
if to be witty or powerful were an end sufficient in 
itself, they will always keep their sacredest respect and 
confidence for that power or wit which is inspired by 
God, and works for righteousness. 

There is still another way, more subtle and sometimes 
more dangerous than these, in which the spirit of man 
may fail of its completest function as the candle of the 
Lord. The lamp may be lighted, and the fire at which 
it is lighted may be indeed the fire of God, and yet it 
may not be God alone who shines forth upon the world. 
I can picture to myself a candle which should in some 
way mingle a peculiarity of its own substance with the 
light it shed, giving to that light a hue which did not 
belong essentially to the fire at which it was lighted. 
Men who saw it would see not only the brightness of 
the fire. They would see also the tone and color of the 
lamp. And so it is, I think, with the way in which some 
good men manifest God. They have really kindled 
their lives at Him. It is His fire that burns in them. 
They are obedient, and so He can make them His 
points of exhibition ; but they cannot get rid of them- 
selves. They are mixed with the God they show. 
They show themselves as well as Him. It is as when 



14 THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 

a mirror mingles its own shape with the reflections of 
the things tliat are reflected from it, and gives them a 
curious convexity because it is itself convex. This is 
the secret of all pious bigotry, of all holy prejudice. It 
is the candle, putting its own color into the flame which 
it has borrowed from the fire of God. The violent man 
makes God seem violent. The feeble man makes God 
seem feeble. The speculative man makes God look like 
a beautiful dream. The legal man makes God look 
like a hard and steel-like law. Here is where all the 
harsh and narrow part of sectarianism comes from. 
The narrow Presbyterian or Methodist, or Episcopalian 
or Quaker, full of devoutness, really afire with God, — 
what is he but a candle which is always giving the 
flame its color, and which, by a disposition which many 
men have to value the little parts of their life more than 
the greater, makes less of the essential brightness of the 
flame than of the special color which it lends to it ? It 
seems, perhaps, as if, in saying this, I threw some slight 
or doubt upon that individual and separate element in 
every man's religion, on which, upon the contrary, I 
place the very highest value. Every man who is a 
Christian must live a Christian life that is peculiarly 
his own. Every candle of the Lord must utter its pe- 
culiar light ; only the true individuality of faith is 
marked by these characteristics which rescue it from 
bigotry : first, that it does not add something to the 
universal light, but only brings out most strongly some 
aspect of it which is specially its own ; second, that it 
always cares more about the essential light than about 
the peculiar way in which it utters it ; and third, that 
it easily blends with other special utterances of the 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 15 

universal light, in cordial sympathy and recognition of 
the value which it finds in them. Let these character- 
istics be in every man's religion, and then the individu- 
ality of faith is an inestimable gain. Then the different 
candles of the Lord burn in long rows down His great 
palace-halls of the world ; and all together, each comple- 
menting all the rest, they light the whole vast space 
with Him. 

I have tried to depict some of the difficulties which 
beset the full exhibition in the world of this great truth 
of Solomon, that '• the spirit of man is the candle of the 
Lord." Man is selfish and disobedient, and will not let 
his life burn at all. Man is wilful and passionate, and 
kindles his life with ungodly fire. Man is narrow and 
bigoted, and makes the light of God shine with his own 
special color. But all these are accidents. All these 
are distortions of the true idea of man. How can we 
know that ? Here is the perfect man, Christ Jesus ! 
What a man He is ! How nobly, beautifully, perfectly 
human ! What hands, what feet, what an eye, what a 
heart ! How genuinely, unmistakably a man ! I bring 
the men of my experience or of my imagination into 
His presence, and behold, just when the worst or best 
of them falls short of Him, my human consciousness 
assures me that they fall short also of the best idea of 
what it is to be a man. Here is the spirit of man in 
its perfection. And what then ? Is it not also the 
candle of the Lord ? " I am come a light into the 
world," said Jesus. " He that hath seen Me hath seen 
the Father." " In Him was life and the life was the 
light of men." So wrote the man of all men who knew 
Him best. And in Him where are the difficulties that 



16 THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 

we saw ? where for one moment is the dimness of self- 
ishness ? 0, it seems to me a wonderful thing that the 
supremely rich human nature of Jesus never for an in- 
stant turned with self-indulgence in on its own richness, 
or was beguiled by that besetting danger of all opulent 
souls, the wish, in the deepest sense, just to enjoy him- 
self. How fascinating that desire is. How it keeps 
many and many of the most abundant natures in the 
world from usefulness. Just to handle over and over 
their hidden treasures, and with a spiritual miserliness 
to think their thought for the pure joy of thinking, 
and turn emotion into the soft atmosphere of a life of 
gardened selfishness. ISTot one instant of that in Jesus. 
All the vast richness of His human nature only meant 
for Him more power to utter God to man. 

And yet how pure His rich life was. How it ab- 
horred to burn with any fire that was not divine. Such 
abundant life, and yet such utter incapacity of any living 
but the holiest ; such power of burning, and yet such 
utter incapacity of being kindled by any torch but God's ; 
such fulness with such purity was never seen besides 
upon the earth ; and yet we know as we behold it that 
it is no monster, but only the type of what all men must 
be, although all men but Him as yet have failed to be it. 

And yet again there was intense personality in Him 
without a moment's bigotry. A special life, a life that 
stands distinct and self-defined among all the lives of 
men, and yet a life making the universal God all the 
more universally manifest by its distinctness, appealing 
to all lives just in proportion to the intensity of the 
individuality that filled His own. O, I think I need 
only bid you look at Him, and you mu-st see what it is to 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 17 

which our feeble lights are struggling. There is the true 
spiritual man who is the candle of the Lord, the light 
that lighteth every man. 

It is distinctly a new idea of life, new to the standards 
of all our ordinary living, which this truth reveals. All 
our ordinary appeals to men to be up and., doing, 
and make themselves shining lights, fade away and 
become insignificant before this higher message which 
comes in the words of Solomon and in the life of Jesus. 
What does the higher message say ? '' You are a part 
of God ! You have no place or meaning in this world 
but in relationship to Him. The full relationship can 
only be realized by obedience. Be obedient to Him, 
and you shall shine by His light, not your own. Then 
you cannot be dark, for He shall kindle you. Then you 
shall be as incapable of burning with false passion as 
you shall be quick to answer with the true. Then the 
devil may hold his torch to you, as he held it to the 
heart of Jesus in the desert, and your heart shall be as 
uninflammable as His. But as soon as God touches 
you, you shall burn with a light so truly your own that 
j^ou shall reverence your own mysterious life, and yet 
so truly His that pride shall be impossible." What a 
philosophy of human life is that. '' 0, to be nothing, 
nothing ! " cries the mystic singer in his revival hymn, 
desiring to lose himself in God. " Nay not that ; to 
be something, something," remonstrates the unmystical 
man, longing for work, ardent for personal life and char- 
acter. Where is the meeting of the two ? How shall 
self-surrender meet that high self-value without which 
no man can justify his living and honor himself in his 
humanity ? Where can they meet but in this truth ? 

2 



18 THE CANDLE OF THE LOKD. 

Man must be something that he may be nothing. The 
something which he must be must consist in simple fit- 
ness to utter the divine life which is the only original 
power in the universe. And then man must be nothing 
that he may be something. He must submit himself in 
obedience to God, that so God may use him, in some 
way in which his special nature only could be used, to 
illuminate and help the world. Tell me, do not the two 
cries meet in that one aspiration of the Christian man 
to find his life by losing it in God, to be himself by 
being not his own but Christ's ? 

In certain lands, for certain holy ceremonies, they 
prepare the candles with most anxious care. The very 
bees which distil the wax are sacred. They range in 
gardens planted with sweet flowers for their use alone. 
The wax is gathered by consecrated hands ; and then the 
shaping of the candles is a holy task, performed in holy 
places, to the sound of hymns, and in the atmosphere of 
prayers. All this is done because the candles are to 
burn in the most lofty ceremonies on most sacred days. 
With what care must the man be made whose spirit is 
to be the candle of the Lord ! It is his spirit which 
God is to kindle with Himself. Therefore the spirit 
must be the precious part of him. The body must be 
valued only for the protection and the education which 
the soul may gain by it. And the power by which his 
spirit shall become a candle is obedience. Therefore 
obedience must be the struggle and desire of his life ; 
obedience, not hard and forced, but ready, loving, and 
spontaneous ; the obedience of the child to the father, 
of the candle to the flame ; the doing of duty not 
merely that the duty may be done, but that the soul in 



THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 19 

doing it may become capable of receiving and uttering 
God ; the bearing of pain not merely because the pain 
must be borne, but that the bearing of it may make the 
soul able to burn with the divine fire which found it in 
the furnace ; the repentance of sin and acceptance of 
forgiveness, not merely that the soul may be saved from 
the fire of hell, but that it may be touched with the fire 
of heaven, and shine with the love of God, as the stars, 
forever. 

- Above all the pictures of life, — of what it means, of 
what may be made out of it, — there stands out this pict- 
ure of a human spirit burning with the light of the God 
whom it obeys, and showing Him to other men. 0, 
my young friends, the old men will tell you that the 
lower pictures of life and its purposes turn out to be 
cheats and mistakes. But this picture can never cheat 
the soul that tries to realize it. The man whose life is 
a struggle after such obedience, when at last his earthly 
task is over, may look forward from the borders of this 
life into the other, and humbly say, as his history of 
the life that is ended, and his prayer for the life that is 
to come, the words that Jesus said — ''I have glorified 
Thee on the earth; now, Father, glorify Me with 
Thyself forever.'' 

[When this sermon was preached in AVestminster Abbey, on the 
evening of Sunday, the Fourth of July, 1880, the following sentences 
were added : — ] 

My Fkiends, — May I ask you to linger while I say 
to you a few words more, which shall not be unsuited 
to what I have been saying, and which shall, for just a 
moment, recall to you the sacredness which this day — 
the Fourth of July, the anniversary of American Inde- 



20 THE CANDLE OF THE LOED. 

pendence — has in the hearts of us Americans. If I 
dare — generously permitted as I am to stand this even- 
ing in the venerable Abbey, so full of our history as 
well as yours — to claim that our festival shall have 
some sacredness for you as well as us, my claim rests 
on the simple truth that to all true men the birthday of 
a nation must always be a sacred thing. For in our 
modern thought the nation is the making-place of men. 
Not by the traditions of its history, nor by the splendor 
of its corporate achievements, nor by the abstract excel- 
lencies of its constitution, but by its fitness to make 
men, to beget and educate human character, to contrib- 
ute to the complete humanity, the " perfect man " that 
is to be, — by this alone each nation must be judged 
to-day. The nations are the golden candlesticks which 
hold aloft the candles of the Lord. No candlestick can 
be so rich or venerable that men shall honor it if it 
holds no candle. '' Show us your man," land cries to 
land. 

In such days any nation, out of the midst of which 
God has led another nation as He led ours, out of the 
midst of yours, must surely watch with anxiety and 
prayer the peculiar development of our common human- 
ity of which that new nation is made the home, the 
special burning of the human candle in that new can- 
dlestick ; and if she sees a hope and promise that God 
means to build in that new land some strong and free 
and characteristic manhood which shall help the world 
to its completeness, the mother-land will surely lose the 
thought and memory of whatever anguish accompanied 
the birth, for gratitude over the gain which humanity 
has made, " for joy that a man is born into the world." 



THE CANDLE OF THE LORD. 21 

It is not for me to glorify to-night the country which 
I love with all my heart and soul. I may not ask your 
praise for anything admirable which the United States 
has been or done. But on my country's birthday I may 
do something far more solemn and more worthy of the 
hour. I may ask you for your prayer in her behalf. 
That on the manifold and wondrous chance which God 
is giving her, — on her freedom (for she is free, since 
the old stain of slavery was washed out in blood) ; on 
her unconstrained religious life ; on her passion for 
education, and her eager search for truth ; on her jealous 
care for the poor man's rights and opportunities ; on her 
countless quiet homes where the future generations of 
her men are growing ; on her manufactures and her com- 
merce ; on her wide gates open to the east and to the 
west ; on her strange meetings of the races out of which 
a new race is slowly being born ; on her vast enterprise 
and her illimitable hopefulness, — on all these materials 
and machineries of manhood, on all that the life of my 
country must mean for humanity, I may ask you to 
pray that the blessing of God the Father of man, and 
Christ the Son of man, may rest forever. 

Because you are Englishmen and I am an American ; 
also because here, under this high and hospitable roof 
of God, we are all more than Englishmen and more than 
Americans; because we are all men, children of God, 
waiting for the full coming of our Father s kingdom, I 
ask you for that prayer. 



II. 

THE JOY OF SELF-SACEIFICE. 

"And when the burnt offering began, the song of the Lord began also 
with the trumpets."— 2 Chron. xxix. 27. 

It had been a day of joy and triumph in Jerusalem. 
Hezekiah, the king, reviving the faith and worship of 
Jehovah, from which his fathers had departed, had 
opened the doors of the temple and cleared out all the 
rubbish of the long neglect, and gathered the priests 
and lighted the lamps and summoned the people, and 
to-day there had been a vast sacrifice to the Lord, in 
which the people had once more declared themselves 
His servants, and given up again their personal and 
national life to Him. The burnt offering declared their 
penitence and consecration. It was the nation's solemn 
sacrifice of itself to God. The verse which I have 
quoted tells us one thing about this sacrifice. It records 
the joy with which it was made — "When the burnt 
offering began, the song of the Lord began with the 
trumpets." Not in a gloomy silence, as if the people 
were doing a hard duty which they would not do if 
they could help it, did the smoke of their offering 
ascend to God ; but with a burst of jubilant music 
and with a song of triumphant joy which rang down 
through the crowded courts, the host of the Jews 
claimed for themselves anew their place in the obedi- 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 23 

ence of God. The act of sacrifice was done amid a 
chorus of delight. 

The old sacrifices are past and done forever. There 
are no more smoking altars or bleeding beasts ; but that 
which they represented still remains, and will remain 
so long as man and God are child and Father to each 
other. The giving up of the life of man away from 
himself to serve his true and rightful Master, the sur- 
render of his life to another, self-sacrifice, which is what 
these burnt offerings picturesquely represented, is uni- 
versally and perpetually necessary. As we study the 
old ceremony, that which it represented stands before 
us ; and one question which comes up, the question 
which I want to make the subject of my sermon for 
this morning, is that which is suggested by the verse 
in the old book of Chronicles, in which the rejoicing 
of the people over their burnt offering is written. It 
is not beasts, but lives that w^e offer. Can the life, 
too, be offered now as the beast was offered of old, 
with song and trumpet ? Can self-sacrifice be a thing 
of triumph and exhilaration ? Can it be the conscious 
glorification of a life to give that life away in self-de- 
nial ? The joy and glory of self-sacrifice shall be our 
subject. 

You know how strangely such a subject must sound 
even to many very good and conscientious people. 
]\Iultitudes of people there are all about us, who thor- 
oughly accept it as the great law and necessity of 
human life that there must be self-sacrifice. It is not 
only that they have been taught it from their earliest 
youth ; not merely that they find it written in what are 
recognized as the highest codes of human living ; but 



24 THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 

their own experience and their own hearts have taught 
it to them. They see that the world would be a dread- 
ful and intolerable place if every creature in it lived 
only for his own mere immediate indulgence. They own 
that the higher nature and the higher purpose every- 
where have a right to the submission of the lower, and 
they freely accept the conviction that the lower must 
submit. The different forms of self-sacrifice stand 
around them with their demands. There is the need 
that a man should sacrifice himself to himself, his lower 
self to his higher self, his passions to his principles. 
There is the need of sacrificing one's self for fellow-men. 
There is the highest need of all, the need of giving up 
our will to God's. All of these needs a man will own 
and honor. He will try to meet them all his life. But 
when you come to talk of joy in meeting them, that is 
another matter. Self-sacrifice seems to him something 
apart from the whole notion of enjoyment. It is a dis- 
agreeable necessity of life. It seems to be tied on to 
life by some strange fate, as if it were the result of some 
terrible mistake. Perhaps the man is able to recognize 
that the necessity is made use of for some purposes of 
education, and so is not wholly unthankful that the 
necessity exists ; but to rejoice over it, to give up our 
own will, to sacrifice our pleasure and take up our task 
witli a song, — that is something which most men, even 
those who work on most scrupulously at their duty 
cannot comprehend. " I know it is my duty because I 
hate it so," somebody said to me once about some task. 
That is the look of duty to multitudes of men. The 
highest dream of the poet is of a state of things in 
which we shall know that something is our duty 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 25 

because we love it so ; the condition in which '' love is 
an unerring light and joy its own security." That con- 
dition, in whatever region of the universe the soul 
attained to it, would be heaven ; and yet it would be 
only the realization and completion of that which was 
set forth in the old ceremony of the book of Chronicles, 
in which the sacrifice was greeted with the blast of the 
trumpets and the songs of the people. 

Heaven seems impossible, and yet there are prom- 
ises and prophecies of heaven on every side of us. 
There are always glimpses of man's highest life which 
show us, like the first streaks of light before the dawn, 
what it would be if all the sky were filled with glory ; 
and so there are always exalted lives, and exalted 
moments in the lives, I hope, of all of us, in which we 
do catch sight of the joy and glory of self-sacrifice. 
Not many years ago, when the young men went to the 
war, was it not true that the fact of sacrifice intensified 
the joy ? It was a joy to save their country, to feel 
sure, as it is not often given to men vividly to feel, that 
they were doing a real and valuable part of her salva- 
tion. But tell me, what made the difference between 
their going and the patient plodding of the clerk up to 
the State House, or the quiet journey of the congress- 
man to Washington to-day ? They too, if they are 
honest and faithful, are saving the country just as truly 
as the soldiers were. Why does the one trudge the 
streets unnoticed, while before the others trumpets 
blew, and around them the crowd shouted, and in their 
bosoms their hearts leaped for joy ? It is easy to say 
that it was the poetry, the romance, the enthusiasm. 
Those are mere words. The essence of it was that in 



/ 



26 THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 

their going the self-sacrifice was vivid and distinct. 
They were leaving home and friends and safety and 
comfort. Ah^ you are very young, too young to remem- 
ber the spirit of those days, if you do not know that 
that self-sacrifice w^as not a drawback on the joy of the 
truest men's enlistment ; it was a part and parcel of 
that joy. No safe and easy task could ever have filled 
the heart with such a sober and deep delight. 

Or think about a man who does something which 
you choose to call a piece of superfluous mercantile 
honesty, but something which, under the higher compul- 
sions that press upon his loftier nature, he thinks that it 
is absolutely necessary for him to do. He has failed in 
business and he has settled with his creditors ; and they 
are satisfied with what they have got from him, and 
give him a full discharge from all his obligations ; and 
by and by the man succeeds again and then, as he 
begins to grow rich once more, he takes upon himself 
the payment, principal and interest, of his old debts. 
He lives like a poor man still. He will not let his life 
grow sumptuous till first it has grown honest. Do you 
say, '' What a slavery ! What a tyrant his conscience 
is to him ! " But to him it is the most enthusiastic 
freedom. He goes his way with his heart making 
music to him all the day long, and following his 
conscience as no most devoted soldier ever followed his 
half-worshipped captain. Every time that another 
comfort is laid upon the altar of his honesty, the song 
of the Lord begins with the trumpets. There may be 
in it some mixture of unworthy pride ; but, if there is, 
it is an alloy and not a refinement, a decrease and not 
an increase of the joy. It makes it nervous, restless. 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 27 

and impatient. But leave that out. Let the man 
simply want to be honest, and then the self-sacrifice, by 
which alone his honesty can be done, is a true element 
in his delight. He is happier in his slow payment 
of his self-recognized debt, in which each dollar that 
he pays means some distinct piece of self-sacrifice, 
than he could be if boundless wealth had suddenly 
tumbled upon him from the skies, of which he, without 
an effort, had easily handed over a little fragment to his 
creditors. 

The words of our text then, however strangely they 
sound at first, are literally true as the history of many a 
man s life. Many and many a man has gone on year 
after year, with little or no zest in his existence, 
perfectly self-indulgent, seeing no need, hearing no call 
to be anything else than self-indulgent, until at last 
there came some change which seemed at first to be a 
terrible misfortune, something which threw the w^hole 
heavy w^eight of other people's lives upon the shoulders 
of this one life, so that it had to forget itself and live 
completely for these others. And then how can you tell 
the story of the difference w^hich came into that 
burdened life ? What w^ords can tell it more perfectly 
than these, " When the burnt offering began, the song 
of the Lord began also with the trumpets " ? From the 
moment that it began to live for other people, this 
nature, which had had no song in it before, became 
jubilant with music. The young self-indulgent man 
becomes the head of a family that taxes his thought by 
day and night. The merely selfish thinker, who has 
worked out his thoughts for the mere luxury of think- 
ing, suddenly finds the world calling for him to plunge 



28 THE JOY OF SELF-SACEIFICE. 

into the detail of some work of charity or education. 
Anything comes which makes a man take up his life as 
it were in his two hands and give it away to be thence- 
forth lived not for himself but for others, who, he has to 
acknowledo^e, have a better rioiit to it, the rioht of an 
imperious need. At first there is reluctance, hesitation. 
The teeth are set. The hands are clenched. The eyes 
look back as if they were leaving all the happiness of 
life behind them. But ask the man a few years later ; 
nay, look at him after he has thoroughly lost himself in 
his new work, and when you see what life has come to 
be to him, what spring there is in every movement, 
what sparkle in every thought, what eagerness, what 
interest, what hope ; is it not clear that just that which 
has come to him, just the abandonment of selfishness 
and some strong impulsive giving of himself away to 
other people, was what was needed to fill all the accum- 
ulations of his life with joy, and to clothe all the quali- 
ties of his character with glory ? 

As one looks round upon the community to-day, how 
clear the problem of hundreds of unhappy lives appears. 
Do we not all know men for whom it is just as clear as 
daylight that that is what they need, the sacrifice of 
themselves for other people ? Eich men who with all 
their wealth are weary and wretched ; learned men 
whose learning only makes them querulous and jealous ; 
believing men whose faith is always souring into 
bigotry and envy, — every man knows what these men 
need ; ji;ist something which shall make them let them- 
selves g9 out into the open ocean of a complete self- 
sacrifice. They are rubbing and fretting and chafing 
themselves against the wooden wharves of their own 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACPvIFICE. 29 

interests to which they are tied. Sometime or other 
a great, slow, quiet tide, or a great, strong, furious storm, 
must come and break every rope that binds them, and 
carry them clear out to sea; and then they will for 
the first time know the true, manly joy for which a man 
was made, as a ship for the first time knows the full joy 
for which a ship w^as made, w^hen she trusts herself to 
the open sea and, with the wharf left far behind, feels 
the winds over her and the waters under her, and recog- 
nizes her true life. Only, the trust to the great ocean 
must be complete. No trial trip will do. ISTo ship can 
tempt the sea and learn its glory, so long as she goes 
moored by any rope, how^ever long, by which she means 
to be drawn back again if the sea grows too rough. 
The soul that trifles and toys with self-sacrifice never 
can get its true joy and power. Only the soul that 
with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives 
itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the 
delight and peace which such complete self-surrender 
has to give. 

One would not seem to be so foolish as to say that 
self-sacrifice does not bring pain. Indeed it does. The 
life of Christ must be our teacher there. He carried the 
song and the trumpet always in his heart. That life, 
marking its way with drops of blood, on which the pity 
of the w^orld has dwelt more tenderly than over any 
other life it knows, has yet alw^ays seemed to the world's 
best standards to be a true triumphal march, radiant 
with splendor all along the way, and closing in a true 
victory at last. Indeed I think that one of the bright- 
est insights which w^e ever get into the human heart and 
its essential breadth and justice, and its power, when it 



30 THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 

is working at its best, to hold what seem contradictory 
ideas in their true spiritual harmony, is given to us 
when we see liow men have been able to see together 
both sides of the life of Jesus, to pity His sorrow and to 
glory in His Imppiness, and yet to blend both of these 
two thoughts of Him into one single idea of one single 
self-consistent Christ. It is a sort of witness of how 
truly men, in that highest mood into which they are 
drawn when they try to study Christ, easily see the 
real truth with regard to human life, which is that in it 
joy and pain, so far from being inconsistent with and 
contradictory to one another, are, in some true sense, 
each others' complements, and neither alone, but both 
together, make the true sum of human life. There is a 
conceivable world where pure, unclouded joy can come, 
just as there are countries where the mountains are very 
lofty and all nature is on so grand a scale that it can 
bear a pure, unclouded sky, and in its unveiled splendor 
perfectly satisfy the eye. But there are other lands 
whose inferior grandeur needs for its perfect beauty the 
effects of mist and cloud that give its lower mountains 
the mystery and poetry which they could not have in 
themselves. So one may compare the Swiss and the 
Scotch landscapes. And something of the same sort is 
true about this world and marks its inferiority, proves 
that it is not yet the perfect state of being. It needs 
the pain of life to emphasize its joy. Its joy is not 
high or perfect enough to do without the emphasis of 
pain. And so, to come back to the point whence we 
digressed, it is not strange that that which is the neces- 
sary condition of joy in this human life — namely, self- 
sacrifice — should be also inevitably associated with 
suffering and pain. 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACFJFICE. 31 

There is another reason why it would seem to be ab- 
solutely necessary that man should have the power of 
finding pleasure in his self-sacrifices, in the actual ful- 
filment of his compelled tasks, the actual doing of the 
necessary duties of his life, and that is found in the 
fact that joy or delight in what we are doing is not a 
mere luxury ; it is a means, a help for the more perfect 
doing of our work. Indeed it may be truly said that 
no man does any work perfectly who does not enjoy his 
w^ork. Joy in one's work is the consummate tool with- 
out which the w^ork may be done indeed, but without 
which the work will always be done slowly, clumsily, 
and without its finest perfectness. Men who do their 
work without enjoying it are like men carving statues 
with hatchets. The statue gets carved perhaps, and is 
a monument forever of the dogged perseverance of the 
artist ; but there is a perpetual waste of toil, and there 
is no fine result in the end. A man who does his work 
with thorough enjoyment of it is like an artist who 
holds an exquisite tool which is almost as obedient to 
him as his own hand, and seems to understand what he 
is doing, and almost works intelligently with him. If 
the only loss of a man who hates his work were the 
mere loss of the luxury of enjoying it, that would be 
bad ; but if, in the loss of the enjoyment of his work, 
he loses a large part of the power for the most effective 
doing of his work, then it is a matter far more serious. 
I passed, the other day, a pawn-broker's shop in an ob- 
scure street here in our city. Its windows showed the 
usual shabby and wretched refuse which belongs to 
such places, that sort of battered and broken driftwood 
which the tide of human energy and hope and success 



32 THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 

has left stranded on the beach when it has ebbed out to 
sea. But one window was a great deal sadder than the 
other. In the first window there were tawdry and faded 
trinkets, old jewelry and bits of cheap personal finery, 
which poverty had confiscated from their desperate or 
careless owners ; but in the other window there were 
piles of workmen's tools — hammers and saws and planes 
and files and axes — the things with which men do 
their work and earn their living. That was the sadder 
window of the two. To lose a trinket is mortification 
and disappointment, but to lose a tool may be ruin. 
And so if joy in work were a mere polish and decora- 
tion of life, it would be sad that man should not have 
it ; but if it is the means by which alone the work of 
life may be effectively and nobly done, then its loss 
may be the very loss of life itself. 

I think we want to urge most strenuously upon 
young men the need, the absolute necessity, that in the 
appointed and demanded work of their life they should 
look for and should find the joy of their life. To do 
your work because you must ; to do your work as a 
slavery ; and then, having got it done as speedily and 
easily as possible, to look somewhere else for enjoyment, 
— that makes a very dreary life. No man who works so 
does the best work. No man who works so lingers 
lovingly over his work and asks himself if there is not 
something he can do to make it more perfect. ''My 
meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to 
finish His work," said Jesus. No doubt it was the 
intrinsic nobleness of His special work that made it 
peculiarly abundant in the enjoyment which it fur- 
nished Him ; and no doubt any young man who has the 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACEIFICE. 33 

choice of several occupations ought to choose that 
which is intrinsically highest, that which is occupied 
with the noblest things. This indeed is what makes 
some professions more liberal than others, — the greater 
power which they have to satisfy and cultivate the na- 
ture of the men who live in them ; but our counsel 
must not be confined to them. To any man engaged in 
any honest, useful work, we want to say : Try just as 
far as possible to find the pleasure of your life in the 
work to which it has been settled that your life must 
be given. Study its principles. Let your interest 
dwell on its details. Make it delightful by the affec- 
tions which cluster round it, by the help which you 
are able through it to give to other people, by the edu- 
cation which your own faculties are getting out of it. 
In all these ways make your business the centre and 
fountain of your joy, and then life will be healthy and 
strong. Then you will not be running everywhere to 
find some outside pleasure which shall make up to you 
for your self-sacrificing toil ; but the scenes of your self- 
sacrificing toil itself, your store or your office or your 
work-bench, shall be bright with associations of delight, 
and vocal with your thankfulness to the God who has 
given you, in them, the most radiant revelations of 
Himself This is the only true transfiguration and suc- 
cess of labor and of life. 

And now, what is to be done about all this ? Men 
say, " 0, yes, it is easy to talk about finding your joy in 
your self-sacrifice and work ; but I have tried it, and 
it cannot be done. SeK-sacrifice is dreadful and unnat- 
ural. We know that we cannot escape it ; but there is 
no joy in it. The only thing to do is to get through 

3 



34 THE JOY OF SELF-SACKIFICE. 

with it as doggedly and speedily as possible, and then 
go off and in some self-indulgence find the real pleasure 
of your life/' But surely that is shallow, superficial 
talk. To talk so is to take for granted that self-sacrifice 
is one invariable thing, and not to see that it is infinitely 
various according to the difference of the men who make 
the sacrifice, and the difference of their relations to the 
thing for which the sacrifice is made. Understand this 
and then the difficulty disappears. Is the sacrifice 
which the most scrupulous and faithful servant makes 
for a child the same thing as the sacrifice which the 
loving mother makes for him ? Is the self-sacrifice of 
the hired mercenary the same thing as the sacrifice of 
the enthusiastic patriot ? There is the key to the whole 
truth. If you can change a man's relation to the thing 
or the person for wliom he makes his sacrifice, you may 
change the whole character of the sacrifice itself ; and 
you may open in it fountains of delight which would 
have seemed before to be impossible. Nothing less 
deep than that will answer. You cannot go to men to 
whom self-sacrifice is misery or drudgery, and exhort 
them to be happy, and tell them and bid them believe 
that self-sacrifice is joy. That is treating them like 
children. That is merely beating a drum before them 
at their work, and asking them to make believe that 
work is play. Nor can you trust to mere animal spirits, 
and that happy temperament which will let some people 
find joy in life in spite of any sacrifices that they are 
called to make. You must have somethinsr a o-reat deal 
realler, deeper, and more universal than either of these ; 
and that can be nothing short of such a relation of a 
man to the object of his sacrifice, such an honor for it. 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 35 

such a sense of its dignity, such a sight of its possi- 
bilities, as will make it a delight to give one's self up to 
it, and will make every pain that is involved in such 
surrender a welcome emphasis upon his value and 
honor for it, and so an increase of his joy. Earlier in 
this sermon I spoke of the three great classes into which 
all the sacrifices which men are called upon to make 
may really be divided. There are the sacrifices which 
a man makes of himself to himself, of his lower nature 
and needs to his higher nature and needs ; there are the 
sacrifices which he makes for his fellow-men ; and there 
are the sacrifices which he makes for God. In these 
three services the world of conscientious men lives and 
works. And very often these services are bondages. 
Very often the world groans bitterly under these bur- 
dens which it will not cast away, and yet which press 
very heavily upon its shoulders. Can anything relieve 
all that ? Suppose that some new power, some new 
revelation or new fact, should come into the world, which 
should change a man's relation to his own self, and to 
his fellow-men, and to God. Then everything would 
certainly be altered. Let some new light shine forth, 
within whose radiance man should see his own spiritual 
self in all its possibilities ; and see his brethren with 
their souls, and all that their souls might become, burn- 
ing and glowing through their coarse, dull bodies ; and 
see God as the dear Father and glorious centre of the 
world ; — let all this come, and then the impossible may 
surely become possible, and the self-sacrifice for things 
so glorious, w^hile it does not lose its pain, may find 
within its pain a joy of which its pain shall be myste- 
riously a part. And, my friends, the truth of these 



36 _ THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 

days, the truth of. this week, is that such a light has 
shone and is forever shining on the earth. " The time 
draws near the birth of Christ." This coming week is 
rich with Christmas glory. The thing that makes it 
glorious, the only thing that can give dignity to all this 
annual outbreak of thankfulness and joy, is that the 
Christmas days are full of the truth of Christ's redemp- 
tion of the world. Christ's redemption of the world 
means, for each man who truly believes in it, just these 
three things : the revelation to the man of his own 
value, and of the value of his fellow-man, and of the 
dearness and greatness of God. The man who has de- 
spised himself and thought his life not worth the living, 
learns that this human nature of his is capable of being- 
inhabited by divinity, and sees in the cross of the Son 
of God w^hat God thinks is the preciousness of his 
human soul. Must not that man then stand in awe 
before himself, and rejoice if, by the sacrifice of his ap- 
petites, he can help this regal soul to its completeness ? 
The man who has despised his fellow-men and asked 
himself, " Why should I give up my pleasure for their 
pleasure, or even for their good ? " sees in the redemp- 
tion how Christ values these lives, and is not so much 
shamed out of his contempt for them as drawn freely 
forward into the precious privilege of honoring them 
and working for them. The man whose God has been 
far off and cold sees God in Christ, and loves Him with 
a love which makes life seem worth the living, simply 
that it may be devoted to work for Him. This is the 
power of Christ's redemption. It transfigures to a man 
his own soul and his brethren and Godj and, seeing 
them in the new light of Christ, the man lifts up his 



THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 37 

head, and his old tasks are altered. To work for such 
masters becomes the glory of his life. Not how he may- 
do as little work as possible, and then escape to find his 
pleasure in some region of self-indulgence ; but how he 
may do as much work as possible, because in work for 
such masters is the seat and fountain of his joy, becomes 
the problem of his life. To be shut out from any chance 
of signifying by self-sacrifice in their behalf his value 
and honor for these masters, would make his life seem 
very worthless. When a new chance to put his passions 
down that he may win character, or to give up some 
pleasure of his own out of the wish to honor his brother 
man and help him, or to sacrifice his own will to the 
will of God, — when such a chance is seen coming 
towards him in the distance, it is not, as it used to be, 
as if the culprit saw the executioner approaching him 
with the sword all drawn to take his life. Rather it is 
as if the born king, who had just discovered his royal 
lineage, saw the priest coming towards him with the 
crown which was to be put upon his head and make him 
thoroughly and manifestly king. He claims his self- 
sacrifice. It is the badge and means of his enthrone- 
ment. And when he takes it ; when he enters, for his 
own soul's good, or for the help of his fellow-men, or for 
the glory of his God, upon some path which men call 
very dark, or some work which men call very hard ; it 
is with a leap of heart as if now at last the king had 
found his own. When his burnt offering begins, his 
song of the Lord begins also with the trumpets. 

It is a wondrous change. The man who really lives 
in the world of Christ's redemption, claims his self- 
sacrifices. He goes up to his martyrdom with a song. 



38 THE JOY OF SELF-SACRIFICE. 

To live in this world, and do nothing for one's own 
spiritual self or for fellow-man or for God, is a terrible 
thing. I have a right to give the less as a burnt offering 
to the greater. Tliere is no happy life except in such 
consecration. No one shall shut me out of that privi- 
lege of my redeemed humanity. 

I wish that I could speak to the spirit of the most 
selfish creature here to-day. I wish I could show him 
wliat a vast region of pleasure and delight lies close at 
his side, on wliich he has never entered, of Avhich he has 
never dreamed. The door that shuts him out of that 
great region of joy is his own contempt. If he will let 
Christ fill the world for him with the light of His re- 
demption, contempt must fall to the ground, and the 
closed door must fly open, and then, '' witli the song of 
the Lord and with the trumpets," the selfish man must 
go out from his selfishness into the untasted and un- 
guessed joy of self-sacrifice. He must "enter into the 
joy of his Lord," the joy of that Christ whose meat was 
to do His Father's will, who gave His life for His 
brethren, and whose throne was a cross. 



III. 

THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAK 

*' The good will of Him that dwelt iu the bush." — Deut. xxxiii. 16. 

Moses had been young and now was old. These 
words are taken from his benediction, w^hich he pro- 
nounced upon the children of Israel as he stood with 
them on the borders of the promised land. There is 
something very touching in the reminiscence. The 
long journey through the desert is over. He has done 
God's work nobly and successfully. Well may he be 
proud of this people that he has led up to the threshold 
of their inheritance. But now his mind is running 
backward. This crowning of his mission with clear 
success reminds him of the time when his mission 
started out in mystery and weakness. He sees again a 
bush which he once saw by a wayside. He is a young 
man again, a shepherd keeping his father-in-law's flock 
on the back side of the desert, by Mount Horeb. He 
sees once more the bush on fire. He draws near again 
with unshod feet, and once more in his aged ears he 
hears the voice out of the bush commissioning him for 
the great work of his life. With that impulse which I 
suppose we all have felt, that brings up at the close of 
any work the freshened memory of its beginning, this 
old man sees the burning bush again as he saw it years 
before, only with deeper understanding of its meaning, 



40 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

and a completer sense of tlie love of God which it in- 
volved. He looks into the past, and all the mercy that 
had come in between, — ' all the miraculous food, and 
the wonderful victories, and the parted waters, and the 
constant guidance, — he sees now were all certainly 
involved in that first summons of God which he had 
once obeyed so blindly ; and when he wants to give his' 
people the benediction that represents to him the most 
complete and comprehensive love, it is touching to hear 
the old man go back and invoke '' The good will of Him 
that dwelt in the bush." 

Keligion delights both in reminiscence and in an- 
ticipation. Being full of the sense of God, it finds 
a unity in life w^hich no atheistic thought can dis- 
cover. The identity of God's eternal being stretches 
under, and gives consistence to, our fragmentary lives. 
God's eternity makes our time coherent. And so it 
was God in the old bush that made it still visible 
to Moses across the eventful interval. He saw that 
bush when all the other bushes of Egypt had faded 
out of sight, because that bush was on fire with God. 
And as Christianity is the most vivid of all religions, 
with its personally manifested God, there is a more per- 
fect unity in a Christian life than in any other. It 
keeps all its parts, and from its consummations looks 
back with gratitude and love to its beginnings. The 
crown that it casts before the throne at last is the same 
that it felt tremblino- on its brow in the first ecstatic 
sense of Christ's forgiveness, and that has been steadily 
glowing into greater clearness as perfecting love has 
more and more completely cast out fear. The feet that 
go uj) to God into the mountain, at the end, are the 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHKISTIAN. 41 

same that first put off their shoes beside the burning 
])ush. This is why the Christian, more than other 
men, not merely dares but loves to look back and re- 
member. 

But I wish to-day to call up this picture of Moses only 
in order to suggest a certain topic. We have the be- 
ginning and the ripening of an experience brought close 
together. Let us think of the young Christian and the 
old Christian : the same man in his first apprehension, 
and in his ripened knowledge, of Christ. What is the 
difference between the two ? What is the growth 
which brings one into the other ? Everybody claims 
that the Christian experience ripens and deepens. 
What is there riper and deeper in the full existence 
tliat there was not in the incipient life ? This is the 
question which I want to study ; or, in other words, we 
may call our subject, — The nature and method of the 
growth of Christian character. I know that every 
Christian, old or young, will welcome such a study if 
it can unfold to us any of the rich and mysterious laws 
of the spiritual life. 

One general and obvious law of all true growth sug- 
gests itself at once, which we will just point out before 
we go on to particulars. It is that every healthy 
growth creates the conditions of new growth, makes 
new growth possible. The illustrations are numberless 
everywhere. Every ray of sunlight that gives some 
ripeness to an apple makes the apple opener to more 
sunlight, which shall ripen it still more. Or, think of a 
nation ; every advance in liberty makes new advances 
not merely possible but necessary. Or, think of man ; 
the powers which develop either the physical or the men- 



42 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

tal nature from fifteen years old to twenty open the 
mind and body to new influences which are to feed it 
from twenty to twenty-five. Every summer is also a 
spring-time. Indeed we may make this a test of 
growth. Every ray of sun which does not open the 
ground to new sunlight, is not feeding it but baking it. 
This is the true test of growing force. It opens the 
beautiful reactions between itself and the growing thing, 
and creates an openness for yet more of itself. 

Now see how this is the method of all Christian 
growth, A child becomes a Christian. He learns, that 
is, to understand and claim the love of Christ. " I 
know that Christ loves me, and wants to train me," the 
glad young heart says. That consciousness makes the 
child's soul purer and more Christlike. Into that soul, 
become more Christly, a yet deeper sense of the love of 
Christ can enter to work a yet greater change. Then, 
to this still renewed soul, opens some newer vision of 
w^hat Christ can do. This new Avork done unfolds 
some new capacity of loving and receiving love. And 
so, in this continual reaction between Christ and the 
soul, — every new openness fed with a new love that 
opens it still more, — the life-long, the eternal work 
goes on. Heaven will be only the fuller, prompter, 
more unhindered pulsing back and forth, between Christ 
and the soul, of this sublime and sweet reaction. This 
was the foundation of the certainty which Paul does for 
his Philippians when he told them that he was " confi- 
dent of this very thing, that He who had begun a 
good work in them would perform it unto the day of 
Jesus Christ." He foresaw for them what he had felt in 
himself, — that love would mean receptivity, that every 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 43 

new love would bring a fuller knowledge, and every 
knowledge lay the soul open to a completer love. 

But, just suggesting this, let us go on and try to par- 
ticularize some of the sorts of difference between the 
young and the maturer Christian, and so see what sorts 
of growth this law of growth, which we have pointed 
out, will produce. 

And, for one thing, I should say that as every Chris- 
tian becomes more and more a Christian, there must be 
a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into 
life. We hear all around us now-a-days a great im- 
patience with the prominence of dogma — that is, of 
truth abstractly and definitely stated — in Christianity. 
And most of those who are thus impatient really mean 
well. They feel that Christianity, being a thing of per- 
sonal salvation, ought to show itself in characters and 
lives. There they are right. But to decry dogma in 
the interest of character, is like despising food as if it 
interfered with health. Food is not health. The hu- 
man body is built just so as to turn food into health 
and strength. And truth is not holiness. The hu- 
man soul is made to turn, by the subtle chemistry of 
its digestive experience, truth into goodness. And 
this, I think, is just what the Christian, as he goes 
on, finds himself doing under God's grace. Before 
the young Christian lie the doctrines of his faith, — 
God's being, God's care, Christ's incarnation, Christ's 
atonement, immortality. What has the old Christian, 
with his long experience, done with them ? He holds 
them no longer crudely, as things to be believed merely. 
He has taken them home into his nature. He has 
transmuted them into forms of life. God's being ap- 



44 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

pears now filling his life with reverence. God's care 
clothes every act and thought of his with gratitude. 
Christ's incarnation is the inspiration of his new, dear 
love of all humanity. The atonement is the power of 
his all-pervading and deep-rooted faith. And immor- 
tality ! He no longer thinks of that as a doctrine, 
which has become a great, constant flood of life, ever 
resting over and illuminating the far-off hill-tops — now 
grown so near, so real — of the eternal life. The young 
dogmatist boasts of his dogmas. The old saint lives 
his life. Both are natural in their places and times, 
as are the uHripe and the ripened fruit. How soon you 
can tell the men whose soils have tugged at the roots 
of their doctrines and taken them in, and left them no 
longer lying on the surface, but made them germinate 
into life. 

And in the second place, as a consequence of this 
feature of growth, there will come a growing variety in 
Christian character as Christians grow older. I think 
we should expect a uniformity and resemblance in 
younger Christians, and a diversity in older ones, 
because life is more various than doctrine. Each 
young Christian has his doctrine, crude and dogmatic 
still. The maturer Christians have not merely worked 
those doctrines into life, but each has worked them into 
his own sort of life. The truth is the same for all ; the 
life it makes is infinite. The more deeply it has been 
digested, the more strongly the individuality comes out. 
The truth which God gives us is like the wheat that a 
bounteous country sends into the city. It is all the 
same wheat ; but men go and buy it and eat it, and 
this same identical wheat is turned into different sorts 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHKISTIAN. 45 

of force in different men. It is turned into barterinof 
force in one, and thinking force in another, and singing 
force in another, and governing force in another. It is 
made manifold as soon as it passes into men. So I 
think every minister finds that, as his disciples grow 
older, if he has really succeeded in getting the truth to 
be their truth, they grow into more various forms of 
Christian charity and usefulness. Each grows more 
evidently to be not merely a Christian, but the Chris- 
tian that God intended him to be. They think more. 
They think differently. The pure white light breaks 
itself to each in different colors. Often the minister is 
alarmed. His confirmation classes, which took the 
truths he taught them out of the Bible all alike, and 
went out all to the same work, — see how they have 
scattered ; see how different they are ! What does it 
mean ? Merely this : it is doctrine passing, growing, 
into life. Those twelve disciples must have seemed 
very much like one another, as they all followed Jesus 
on the road, or sat around Him in the temple, drinking in 
His words. But see, after His words had become their 
life, how clear, distinct, and individual they are — John, 
Peter, James, Matthew. The seed looks the same ; the 
flowers are so different. . Let us rejoice in the clear 
individuality of maturing Christian life. Its one prin- 
ciple is still identical ; and so it already prophesies 
heaven, where we are sure we shall be all different illus- 
trations of the one same grace, showing different charac- 
ters, set to different works but all moved by one spirit, 
all illustrations of the one same grace still. 

And as individuality is developed with the deepening 
spiritual life, so I am sure that the willingness to recog- 



46 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

nize and welcome individual differences of thought and 
feeling and action increases, too, as Christians grow 
riper. Seeing ourselves made more ourselves as our 
faith grows richer, we are glad to see other men made 
more themselves too. This is true charity. It is your 
undeveloped, crude, commonplace Christian who is 
uncharitable. He expects other Christians to be like 
himself. He has never felt that divine, deep movement 
of Christ in his own soul, telling him that from all 
eternity there has been one certain place for him to fill, 
one certain thing for him to be, and summoning him to 
come and fill his place and be himself; and so when 
some brother rises out of the crowd of undistinguish- 
able believers, and goes out to stand upon his outpost, 
this other soul rebukes him, calls him arrogant, radical, 
wise beyond what is written, and foolish names like 
those. I can well understand that the seeds in a 
sower's basket might be " very uncharitable to one 
brother-seed that had dropped out of the basket and 
taken root and grown to be a stalk of corn. It is too 
unlike them. It is too original and singular. But let 
them all fall together and take root, and then, with life 
in all of them, they will not compare their ears and 
tassels, each being so busy in growing to the best that 
its separate bit of earth can bring it to. The true 
Christian charity is that which life teaches. It is the 
tried and cultured souls that understand each other's 
trials and cultures, though they be wholly different from 
their own. And no sight is more beautiful than to see 
this grace growing in a body of believers. 

It helps us much, I think, if we can recognize the fit- 
ness of this progress. Narrowness of view and sympathy 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 47 

is not unnatural in a new believer. It is very unnatural 
in the maturer Christian life. In the one it is the 
sourness of unripe fruit, showing only unripeness ; in 
the other it is the sourness of a ripe apple or of an apple 
that ought to be ripe, and proves cramped and stunted 
life. The figures which most naturally suggest them- 
selves are these of vegetable life, when we are talking 
of growth of any sort. I do not say that it is best for 
the young Christian to be illiberal. Far better certainly 
if he could leap at once to the full comprehension and 
the wide charity which the older Christian gathers out 
of the experience of life. But, as a fact, it is too apt to 
be the case that only by experience does the Christian 
reach this breadth of sympathy, which comes not from 
indifference, but from the profoundest personal earnest- 
ness. It is something wholly different from the loose 
tqleration which some men praise, which is negative, 
which cares nothing about what is absolutely true or 
false. This is positive. It holds fast to its certain 
truths, well proved, long tried. Just because those 
truths have laid intense hold upon its deepest soul, and 
become its truths in its own shapes, it expects and re- 
joices to see them, the same truths still, becoming other 
men's in their own shapes. This is the only true Chris- 
tian charity, the only charity that rejoiceth in the 
truth. 

And here comes in another noble' characteristic of the 
growing spiritual experience, its ever-increasing inde- 
pendence. This is the best personal result of charity. 
There is an independence which is arrogant and defiant, 
and there is a dependence that is weak and fawning. 
Both come of narrowness. Both are the signs of imma- 



48 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHKISTIAN. 

ture and meagre life. One man arms himself against 
his brethren because he holds them to be wholly wrong 
and himself wholly right. Another man yields to his 
brethren because he fears that he is wrong and they are 
right. There is a man of melloAV strength who, deeply 
conscious of the work the Lord has done in him, made 
sure of it by long feeling the very pressures of God's hand 
kneading the truth into his nature, stands by that 
work ; will let no man cavil it away from his tenacious 
consciousness ; is so perfectly dependent upon Christ 
that he can hang upon no fellow-man ; respects himself 
by the same reverence for the individuality of the 
divine life that makes him also respect his brethren. 

The analogies between a man's life and the world's 
life are so continually suggested that one often wonders 
whether there be not some analogy here ; whether some- 
such progress into charity by the very positiveness of 
faith, may not be possible, may not be coming as the 
final solution of all these problems which keep the 
world so full of jealousy and strife. At present it 
seems to be assumed that narrowness is essential to 
positive belief, and that toleration can be reached only 
by general indifference. Not long ago I read this 
sentence in what many hold to be our ablest and most 
thoughtful journal : " It is a law, which in the present 
condition of human nature holds good, that strength of 
conviction is always in the inverse ratio of the tolerant 
spirit." If that is so, then the present condition of 
human nature is certainly very much depraved. But if 
human nature ever can be rescued by a personal salva- 
tion, if mankind can ever become possessed by the 
Spirit of God, Lifting the mass by fiUing the individuals 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 49 

each with his own strong manifestation of its power, 
then the world may still see some maturer type of 
Christianity, in which new ages of positive faith may 
still be filled with the broadest sympathy, and men 
tolerate their brethren without enfeebling themselves. 
Such ages may God hasten. 

Let us pass on. I think another sign of the growth 
of Christian character is to be found in what we may 
call the growing transfiguration of duty. See what I 
mean. To every young Christian the new service of 
Christ comes largely with the look of a multitude of 
commandments. They throng around his life, each one 
demanding to be obeyed. He welcomes them joyously. 
He takes up his tasks with glad hands still, because 
they are his Master's tasks. But as he grows older in 
grace, is there no difference ? Tell me, you who have 
long been the servants of our dear and gracious Lord, has 
there come in your long Christian life no change in the 
whole aspect of your service ? Has not your more and 
more intimate sympathy with Him let you in behind 
many and many a duty w^hich once seemed dark and 
hard, and allowed you to see the light of His loving 
intention burning there ? Have you not grown into a 
clearer and deeper understanding of what Jesus meant 
by those sweet and wonderful words, " Henceforth I 
call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what 
his Lord doeth ; but I have called you friends, for all 
things that I have heard of my Father I have made 
known unto you" ? In every opening Christian life 
there is something Mosaic, something Hebrew. The 
order of the Testaments is somewhat repeated in the 
experience of every believer. At last, in the fulness of 

4 



50 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHKISTIAN. 

time, tlie New Testament has perfectly come. The law 
is given first, and then grace and truth come by Jesus 
Christ. It is no sudden transformation. It cannot be, 
because it cannot come otherwise than by the gradual 
teaching of life. But when it has wholly come, then, 
full of the complete consciousness of Christ, duty is done 
not simply because Christ has commanded it and we 
love Him, but because Christ has fiUed us with Himself, 
transformed our standards, recreated our affections, and 
we love the duty too, seeing its essential beauty as He 
sees it, out of whose nature it proceeds. I am sure that 
such a change does come both in our active and our 
passive duties. The fight that we must fight, or the 
sickness that we must bear, both change from tasks, to 
be done because He commands them, into privileges 
which we embrace because we love them. Do we not 
all feel the change that had come between Paul crying 
submissively " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " 
looking to an outside Christ for commandment, and the 
same Paul crying " Not I live but Christ liveth in me ! " 
rejoicing in the inspiration of an inward Savior ? This 
was the perfect victory after which Paul was always 
longing so intensely. It did not come perfectly to him 
in this world. It cannot to any of us. Dependent as 
it is upon the knowledge of Christ by the soul, it can- 
not be perfect till the soul's knowledge of Christ shall 
be perfect in heaven. Here we must alwajs see duty, 
like God, " in a glass, darkly ; " only there " face to face.'' 
But as it begins to come here, duty already begins to be 
transfigured before us. It puts on its divinity. Its 
face shines as the sun. Its raiment, which seemed cold, 
becomes white as the light. Already we see its beauty. 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 51 

Already we see how we shall love it some day ; and we 
cry out like the apostles, " Lord, it is good for us to be 
here. Let us stay here where duty is seen to be noth- 
ing but the glorious atmosphere of Thy personal will." 

But this brings us to what after all we must hold to 
be the profoundest and most reliable sign of the matur- 
ing* spiritual life. All these of which we have been 
speaking are only secondary symptoms of the great 
privilege of the Christian, which is deepening personal 
intimacy with Him who is the Christian's life, the Lord 
Jesus Christ. All comes to that at last. Christianity 
begins with many motives. It all fastens itself at last 
upon one motive, which does not exclude, but is large 
enough to comprehend all that is good in all the rest, 
"That I may know Him." Those are Paul's words. 
How constantly we come back to his large, rounded life, 
as the picture of what the Christian is and becomes. If 
I could set before you the young man at Damascus and 
the old man at Eome, and bid you compare the two, 
this sermon I am preaching need not have been begun. 
'' That I may know Him." We have all seen, I am 
sure, if it has been our privilege to watch true Chris- 
tians growing old, the special and absorbing way with 
which the personal Christ, their knowledge of Him, and 
His knowledge of them, comes to be all their religion. 
You hear them talk of Him, and it seems already as if 
their lives had entered into that heaven, which, as we 
read the mystic description of it in the book of Eevela- 
tions, seems to consist in His personality. He is its 
temple ; He is its sun ; His name is written on the fore- 
heads of its happy saints. Indeed Christ, to the Chris- 
tian growing older, seems to be what the sun is to the 



52 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

developing day, which it lightens from the morning to 
the evening. When the snn is in the zenith in the 
broad noon-day, men do their various works by his light ; 
but they do not so often look up to him. It is the sun- 
light that they glory in, flooding a thousand tasks with 
clearness, making a million things beautiful. But as the 
world rolls into the evening, it is the sun itself at sun- 
set that men gather to look at and admire and love. 
So to the earlier and middle stages of a Christian life, 
Christ is the revealer of duty and truth ; and duty and 
truth become clear and dear in His light. The young 
Christian glories in the way in which, under his Master's 
power, he can work for humanity, for truth, for his 
nation, for society, for his family. But as the Christian 
life ripens into evening, it is not these things, though 
they are not forgotten, that the soul dwells on most. 
It is the Lord Himself. It is that He is the soul's, and 
the soul is His. It is His wondrousness, His dearness, 
and His truth, that fill the life as it presses closer to 
where He stands, — as the setting earth rolls on towards 
the sun. 

And this is philosophical It is strictly in accordance 
with the whole nature of our religion that it should thus 
grow. It cannot be perfect all at once. For Chris- 
tianity is knowing Christ, and personal knowledge can 
come only by experience ; and experience takes time. 
A truth you may embrace, and embrace completely, so 
soon as you understand the terms of its statement and 
have learned its evidence. But you cannot bring a per- 
son, as you can a proposition, up to a man, and say 
" Here, know him ! " as you say " Know this ! " and be 
at once obeyed. " I cannot," he replies. " However 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 53 

thoroughly you vouch for him, I cannot know him till 
he shows himself to me. I thank you for bringing him 
to me. I thank you more than if I could know him 
all at once, for if he is really all you say, then there lies 
before me a long career of gradual knowledge that shall 
be all delight to me till I shall know him perfectly." 
This seems to me one difference of Christians. Make 
Christianity a doctrinal system, and when your new 
disciple has learned his catechism, he is all done ; and 
pretty soon you will find him sitting with his hands in 
his lap, complaining that there is nothing more to learn, 
and either finding his well-learned faith dull and unin- 
teresting, or supplementing it with dogmatic speculations 
of his own. Make Christianity a personal knowledge of 
Christ, and then, with ever new enticements, each little 
that he knows opening to him something more to know 
of the infinite personal life, obedience feeding love, and 
love stimulating obedience, he presses on in the never 
stale, never weary ambition of " knowing Christ." 

Far be it from me to think or talk as if there were 
two religions, one for the young Christian and one for 
the older ; as if the power of the personal Christ were 
not present to waken the first good desire of the new 
life, as it is at last to crown the victorious well-doer 
kneeling on the steps of the throne. I pointed out, in 
opening, that just this — the continuous presence of a 
manifested God — is what makes the unity of the Chris- 
tian life. Do not misunderstand me then. I turn to 
the youngest child just beginning to try to do right, and 
I see the little hand clasped in the hand of a Savior 
who is holding it close, who is watching the feeble feet, 
who is bending over and listening to his prayers. But 



54 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

just because that child has already tasted the power of a 
present Christ, he is able to comprehend the beauty of 
the life you offer him when you tell him that it is all 
to be the development of that relationship in which he 
finds himself already, the deepening of that friendship 
between him and his Lord. 

There is as yet no culture, no method of progress 
known to men, that is so rich and complete as that which 
is ministered by a truly great friendship. No natural 
appetite, no artificial taste, no rivalry of competition, no 
contagion of social activity, calls out such a large, 
healthy, symmetrical working of a human nature, as the 
constant, half-unconscious power of a friend's presence 
whom we thoroughly respect and love. In a true friend- 
ship there is emulation without its jealousy ; there is 
imitation without its servility. When one friend teaches 
another by his present life, there is none of that divorce 
of truth from feeling, and of feeling from truth, wdiich in 
so many of the world's teachings makes truth hard, and 
feeling weak ; but truth is taught, and feeling is inspired, 
by the same action of one nature on the other, and they 
keep each other true and warm. Surely there is no 
more beautiful sight to see in all this world, — full as it 
is of beautiful adjustments and mutual ministrations, — 
than the growth of two friends' natures who, as they 
grow old together, are always fathoming, with newer 
needs, deeper depths of each other's life, and opening 
richer veins of one another's helpfulness. And this best 
culture of personal friendship is taken up and made, in 
its infinite completion, the gospel method of the pro- 
gressive saving of the soul by Christ. 

When we get this idea of Christianity, there is noth- 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHEISTIAN. 55 

iug strange in the halo of dearness which, to every 
Christian, hangs around the scenes with which the 
beginning of his new life is associated. The place where 
two friends first met is sacred to them all through their 
friendship — all the more sacred as their friendship 
deepens and grows old. It is the same sort of feeling 
which sent the heart of Moses back to the bush. And 
to how many a saint the day and place where he first 
heard God's voice will be earth's one sacred memory, 
even long after earth's life is over. Do you think that 
Moses will not speak of the bush, and Samuel of the 
little temple-chamber, and Peter and John of their boats 
on the still lake, and Paul of the Damascus road, and 
Matthew of his tax-table, and the poor woman of the 
wayside well, when they are met above ? Only the last 
day shall tell how much of earth is hallowed ground. 
This is what makes the old churches holy with an 
accumulated sacredness which surpasses their first conse- 
cration. Who can tell how many this church of ours 
w^ill find among the blessed to honor and treasure her 
forever, that she may not be forgotten w^hen the birth- 
places of souls are remembered ? This has always been 
the feeling of the world about Palestine, the land 
where the world first knew Christ, — sometimes breaking 
out into a crusade for its recovery ; sometimes cheering 
the weariness of pilgrims who were struggling on to see 
Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives before they died ; 
sometimes showing itself in the mystical transfer of the 
names of Palestinian geography to the hills and valleys, 
the heights and depths of the spiritual life. A recent 
English scholar has pointed out how often St. Paul's 
religious thought looked back to the scene of Stephen's 



56 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

martyrdom, where, as he stood by and held the mur- 
derers' clothes, his own first earnest interest in Chris- 
tianity was blindly stirred. Paul's speech at Antioch 
reminds us throughout of Stephen's defence before his 
judges. Paul's address at Athens uses some of Stephen's 
very w^ords. Several of Paul's most difficult and deepest 
phrases in his Epistles seem to correspond with forms 
of thought which the martyr had uttered years before, 
and which had sunk into the mind of the thoughtful 
young Jew. It is indeed a goodly spirit that treasures 
its past miracles, that goes down the gracious avenues 
of life to find the bushes out of which it first heard 
God's voice. 

But come back for a few moments to our thought 
about the personal presence of Christ becoming clearer 
to us as we grow riper in the Christian life. Let me 
point out, in a word or two, three or four of the effects 
that it must produce, which are the noble characteristics 
of the maturest Christians : 

First, it must give us a more infinite view of life in 
general, or, in other words, must make us more un- 
worldly. To be always living with One whose kingdom 
is not of this world ; to be constantly conversant, as we 
hold intercourse with Him, with the thought that there 
are other worlds also over which He presides, and with 
which we have something to do through our union with 
Him, — how this breaks up and scatters the littleness 
of life, the bondage of the seen. How it lets us oat, 
free to trace the course of every action, the career of 
every thought, as it seeks vast untold issues in other 
spheres. More and more terrible appears to me the 
crowding in of life, its inability to scale and grasp the 



THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 57 

things that it was made for. Even our religion busies 
itself with little temporal duties, with church machiner- 
ies and observances. What is there that can lift it all, 
and enlarge it and let it free, except the constant known 
presence of One who is infinite and who lives in infin- 
ity — the God of eternity made known to us as our be- 
loved Christ ? 

And, if we get this, then something else must come, 
namely, more hopefulness. St. Paul has a noble verse 
which says that " experience worketh hope." It must, 
if it is full of Christ. The soul that is getting deeper 
and deeper into the certain knowledge of Him must be 
learning that it has no right to fear; that however 
hopeless things look there can be nothing but success 
for every good cause in the hand of Christ. It is a 
noble process for a man*s life that gradually changes the 
cold dogma that "truth is strong and must prevail" 
into a warm enthusiastic certainty that "my Christ 
must conquer." It is terrible to see a man calling him- 
self a Christian w^ho despairs more of the world the 
longer that he lives in it. It shows that he is letting 
the world's darkness come betAveen him and his Lord's 
light. It shows that he is not near enough to Christ. 

And with the growing hopefulness there comes a 
growing courage. How timid we are at first. I be- 
come a Christian, and it seems as if just to get this soul 
of mine saved were all that I could dare to try ; but as 
the Savior's strength becomes more manifest to me, as 
I know Him more, I see that He is able to do much 
more than that. I begin to aspire to have a little part 
in the great conquest of the world in which He is en- 
gaged. And so the Soldier of the Cross at last is out in 



58 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 

the very thick of the battle, striking at all his Master's 
enemies in the perfect assurance of his Master's 
strength. 

And then, as the crown of all these, there comes to 
the maturing Christian, out of his constant companion- 
ship with Christ, that true and perfect poise of soul 
which I think growls more and more beautiful as we 
get tired, one after another, of the fantastic and one- 
sided types of character which the world admires, and 
which seem to us very attractive at first. Expectant 
without impatience ; patient without stagnation ; wait- 
ing, but always ready to advance ; loving to advance, 
but always ready to wait ; full of confidence, but never 
proud ; full of certainty, but never arrogant ; serene, 
but enthusiastic; rich as a great land is rich in the 
peace that comes to it from the government of a great, 
wise, trusty governor, — this is the life w^hose whole 
power is summed up in one word — Faith. '' Here is 
the patience and faith of the saints." This is the life 
to which men come wdio, through long years, " follow 
the Lamb whithersoever He goeth." 

" The good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush." I 
have tried to depict what comes between the Bush and 
the Mountain, what it is on which the aged follower of 
Christ looks, back; what it is to which the young fol- 
lower of Christ looks forward. Some of you are stand- 
ing as Moses stood, — the desert crossed, the promised 
land almost entered, the work done lying back behind 
you. I know not where it was, — in some church-pew, 
in some closet's privacy, in some stillness or some 
crowd, — years ago the fire came ; the common life about 
you burned with the sudden presence of Divinity; 



THE YOUXG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 59 

God called you, and you gave yourself to God. I bid 
you look back and see the mercy that has led you ever 
since, and strengthen your hope and courage and charity 
and faith as you remember the long, long good-will of 
Him that dwelt in the bush. And some of you I hope, 
I know, are standing just by the bush-side still, the 
shoes off your feet, the voice of God in your ears, 
lifted up with the desire for the new life of Christ. You 
are determined to be His, for He has called you. Well, 
till the end, life here and hereafter will be only the 
unfolding of this personal love which seems to you so 
dear and so mysterious now. Christ will grow realler, 
nearer, more completely your Master and your Savior 
all your life. That is the whole of your religion. But 
as you go on you will find that that is enough, that it 
is more than eternity can exhaust. The mercy which 
takes you into its bosom at last in heaven, will be still 
the old familiar good-will of Him that dwelt in the 
bush. 



IV. 

THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 

" Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, 
and he shall go no more out ; and I will T^Tite upon him the name of 
my God, and the name of the city of my God, . . . and my new 
name." — Rev. ii?. 12. 

It is very many years since these great words were 
sent abroad into a world of struggle. We can hardly 
read them without remembering on what countless souls 
they have fallen in a shower of strength. Men and 
women everywhere, wrestling with life, have heard the 
promise to " him that overcometh ; '' and, though much of 
the imagery in which the promise was conveyed w^as 
blind to them, though they very vaguely identified 
their conflict with the battle which these far-off people 
in the Book of the Eevelation were engaged in fighting, 
still, the very sound of the words has brought them in- 
spiration. Let us study the promise a little more care- 
fully this morning. Perhaps it will always be worth 
more to us if we do. A text which we have once studied 
is like a star upon which we have once looked through 
the telescope. We always see it afterwards, full of the 
brightness and color wdiich that look showed us. Even if 
it grows dim behind a cloud, or other nearer stars seem 
to outshine it, Ave never think it dull or small after we 
have once looked deep into its depths. 

" To him that overcometh/' reads the promise ; and 



THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEIMPLE. 61 

the first thing that we want to understand is what the 
struggle is in which the victory is to be won. It is the 
Savior Christ who speaks. His voice comes out of 
the mystery and glory of heaven to the church in Phil- 
adelphia, and this book, in which His words are written, 
stands last in the New Testament. The gospel story is 
all told. The work of incarnation and redemption is all 
done. Jesus has gone back to His Father, and now is 
speaking down to men and women on the earth, who 
are engaged there in the special struggle for which He 
has prepared the conditions, and to which it has been 
the purpose of His life and death to summon them. Let 
us remember that. It is a special struggle. It is not 
the mere human fight with pain and difficulty which 
every living mortal meets. It is not the wrestling for 
place, for knowledge, for esteem, for any of the prizes 
which men covet. Nay, it is not absolutely the struggle 
after righteousness ; it is not the pure desire and deter- 
mination to escape from sin, considered simply as the 
aspiration of a man's own nature and the determination 
of a man s own will. It is not to these that Christ looks 
down and sends His promise. He had called out a special 
struggle on the earth. He had bidden men struggle 
after goodness, out of love and gratitude and loyalty to 
Him. 

If the motive, everywhere and always, is the greatest 
and most important part of every action, then there must 
always be a difference between men who are striving to 
do right and not to do wrong, according to the love 
which sets them striving. If it is love of themselves, 
their struggle will be one thing. If it is love of the ab- 
stract righteousness, it will be another. If it is love of 



62 THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 

Christ, it will be still another. Jesus is talking to the 
men and women there among the Asian mountains, and 
to the hosts of men and women who were to come after 
them npon the earth, who should be fighters against 
sin, against their own sin, who should struggle to be pure 
and brave and true and spiritual and unselfish, because 
they loved Christ, because He had lived and died for 
them, because they belonged to Him, because He would 
be honored and pleased by their goodness, grieved and 
dishonored by their wickedness ; because by goodness 
they would come into completer sympathy with Him, 
and gain a fuller measure of His love. It is to men 
and women in this struggle that Christ speaks, and 
promises them the appropriate reward which belongs to 
perseverance and success in just that obedience of loy- 
alty and love. 

For one of the discoveries that we make, as soon as 
we grow thoughtful about life at all, is that the world is 
not merely full of struggle, but full of many kinds of 
struggle, which vary very much in value. We begin 
by very broad and superficial classifications. Men are 
happy or unhappy ; men are wise or foolish ; men are 
generous or stingy. But by and by such broad divisions 
will not satisfy us. The great regions into which we 
have classified our fellow-men begin to break up and 
divide. There are all kinds of happiness, all kinds of 
wisdom, all kinds of generosity. It means little to us, 
when we have once found this out, to be told that a 
man is happy, wise, or generous, until we have learned 
also the special quality of this quality as it appears in 
him, how he came to possess it, and how he works it out 
in life. And so in all the world-full of struggling men. 



THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 63 

as we observe them we find by and by that there are dif- 
ferences. A great, broad mass of eager, dissatisfied, ex- 
pectant faces it appears at first; a wild and restless 
tossing hither and thither, as if a great ship had broken 
asunder in mid-ocean, and her frightened people, with 
one common fear and dread of being drowned, were 
struggling indiscriminately in the waves. But at last 
all that changes, and we wonder how it ever could have 
looked so to us. Struggle comes to seem as various 
as life. The objects for w^hich men struggle, and the 
strength by which men struggle, grow endlessly various. 
And then, among the mass that seemed one general and 
monotonous turmoil, there stand out these — there shine 
out these — w^hose struggle is against sin, for holiness, and 
by the love of Christ. Other men struggle against pov- 
erty, against neglect ; for ease, for power, for fame ; and by 
the love of self, the noble abstract love of righteousness ; 
but, scattered through the whole mass thickly enough 
to give it character and add a new, controlling strain to 
the eternal music of aspiring discontent which rises from 
the swarm of human living, there are these strugglers 
against sin, by the love of Christ. They are by your 
side. They are in your houses. They meet you in the 
street. Your children are catching sight of that struggle, 
and its fascination and its power, in the times when they 
are silent and thoughtful, and seem to be passing out of 
your familiar understanding. Your friend, whose care- 
lessness concerning the things about which you are eager 
seems so strange to you, is careless about them only be- 
cause he is fighting a deeper fight. He is fighting against 
sin, by the love of Christ. Therefore, he does not dread 
the poverty and the unpopularity against which your 
selfishness makes you so eager to fear and fight. 



64 THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 

This then is the peculiar straggle to the victory in 
which Christ, out of heaven, gives His promise. And 
now the promise can be understood if we understand the 
struggle. The two belong together. " Him that over- 
cometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, 
and he shall go no more out.'' The ideas of the pillar 
in a building, in a temple, are these two : incorporation 
and permanence. The pillar is part of the structure ; 
and when it is once set in its place it is to be there as 
long as the temple stands. How clear the picture stands 
before us. There is a great, bright, solemn temple, 
where men come to worship. Its doors are ever open ; 
its windows tempt the sky. There are many and many 
things which have to do with such a temple. The 
winds come wandering through its high arches. Perhaps 
the birds stray in and build their nests, and stray away 
asrain when the short summer is done. The children 
roam across its threshold, and play for a few moments 
on its shining floor. Banners and draperies are hung 
upon its walls awhile, and then carried away. Poor 
men and women, with their burdens and distress, come 
in and say a moment's prayer, and hurry out. Stately 
processions pass from door to door, making a brief dis- 
turbance in its quiet air. 'Generation after generation 
comes and goes and is forgotten, each giving its place 
up to another ; while still the temple stands, receiving 
and dismissing them in turn, and outliving them all. 
All these are transitory. All these come into the temple 
and then go out again. But a day comes when the 
great temple needs enlargement. The plan which it 
embodies must be made more perfect. It is to grow to 
a completer self. And then they bring up to the doors a 



THE PILLAR 1.. 

column of cut stone, hewn in the 
place, fitted and fit for this place a. 
bringing it in with toil, they set it solidlj 
of the growing structure, part of the expan., 
It blends with all the other stones. It loses ^a.. 
keeps its individuality. It is useless, except there whu 
it is ; and yet there, where it is, it has a use which is 
peculiarly its own, and different from every other stone's. 
The walls are built around it. It shares the building s 
changes. The reverence that men do to the sacred place 
falls upon it. The lights of sacred festivals shine on its 
face. It glows in the morning sunlight, and grows dim 
and solemn as the dusk gathers through the great ex- 
panse. Generations pass before it in their worship. 
They come and go, and the new generations follow them, 
and still the pillar stands. The day when it was hewn 
and set there is forgotten ; as children never think when 
an. old patriarch, whom they see standing among them, 
was born. It is part of the temple where the men so 
long dead set it so long ago. From the day that they 
set it there, it " goes no more out." 

Can we not see perfectly the meaning of the figure ? 
There are men and women everywhere who have some- 
thing to do with God. They cannot help touching and 
being touched by Him, and His vast purposes, and the 
treatment which He is giving to the world. They cross 
and recross the pavement of His providence. They 
come to Him for what they w^ant, and He gives it to 
them, and they carry it away. They ask Him for bread, 
and then carry it off into the chambers of their own self- 
ishness and eat it. They ask Him for power, and then 
go off to the battlefields or workshops of their own self- 

5 



uOD S TEMPLE. 

xliey are forever going in and out 
L . Grod. They sweep through His tem- 
-andering wind; or they come in like the 
vi'shipper, and bend a moment's knee before the 
And tlien there are the other men who are strug- 
_^xmg to escape from sin, by the love of Christ. How 
different they are. The end of everything for them is to 
get to Christ, and put themselves in Him, and stay there. 
They do not so much want to get to Christ that they 
may get away from sin, as they want to get away from 
sin that they may get to Christ. God is to them not 
merely a great helper of their plans ; He is the sum of 
all their plans, the end of all their wishes, the Being to 
whom their souls say, not " Lord, help me do what I will ; " 
but, " Lord, show me Thy will that I may make it mine, 
and serve myself in serving Thee." When such a soul 
as that comes to Christ, it is like the day when the 
marble column from the quarry was dragged up and set 
into the temple aisle. Such a soul becomes part of the 
great purpose of God. It can go no more out. It has 
no purpose or meaning outside of God. Its life is hid 
there in the sacred aisles of God's life. If God's life 
grows dark, the dusk gathers around this pillar which 
is set in it. If God's life brightens, the pillar burns and 
glows. Men who behold this soul, think instantly of 
God. They cannot picture the pillar outside of the 
temple ; they cannot picture the soul outside of the fear, 
the love, the communion, the obedience of God. 

The New Testament abounds with this idea and the 
discrimination which we have been trying to make. 
When the Prodigal Son comes back to his Father, he 
cries out, " I am not worthy to be called Thy son ; 



iD 



THE PILLAR IX GOD'S TEMPLE. 67 

make me as one of Thy hired servants ; " but the Father 
answers, '^ This, My son, was dead, and is alive again ;" 
and the pillar is set up in the temple. When Jesus 
looks into His disciples' faces at the last supper. He says : 
" Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant 
knoweth not what his Lord doeth ; but I have called 
you friends, for all things which I have heard of my 
Father I have made known unto you." The servant is 
the drapery hung upon the nails ; the friend is the pillar 
built into the wall. Paul writes to the Eomans : " Who 
shall separate us from the love of Christ ? Shall tribu- 
lation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or naked- 
ness, or peril, or sword ? I am persuaded that neither 
death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor 
depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate 
us from the love of God." It is the calm assurance 
of the pillar which feels the pressure of the wall around 
it, and defies any temptation to entice it, or any force to 
tear it away. 

N"or is there anything unphilosophical, or unintelli- 
gible, or merely mystical in all this. The same thing 
essentially occurs everywhere. Two men both come to 
know another man, richer and larger than either of them. 
Something called friendship grows up between each of 
them and him. But the first of the two men who seek 
this greater man, comes and goes into and out of his 
great neighbor's life. He keeps the purposes of his 
own life distinct. He comes to his rich friend for 
knowledge, for strength, for inspiration, and then he 
carries them off and uses them for his own ends. The 
other friend gives up all ends in life which he has 



68 THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 

valued, and makes this new man's, this greater man's 
purposes, his. He wants what this great man wants, 
because this great man wants it. Naturally and easily 
we say that he '' lives in " this other man. By and by 
you cannot conceive of him as separate from this greater 
life. The reward of his loving devotion is that he is 
made a pillar in the temple of his friend, and goes no 
more out. 

Two men both love their country. One loves her 
because of the advantage that he gets from her, the 
help that she gives to his peculiar interests. The other 
loves her for herself, for her embodiment of the ideas 
which he believes are truest and divinest and most 
human. One uses the country. The other asks the 
country to use him. One goes into the country's ser- 
vice and gathers up money or knowledge or strength, 
and then, as it were, goes out and carries them with 
him to help the tasks which he has to do in his own 
private life. The other takes all his private interests, 
and sacrifices them to the country's good. And what is 
the reward of this supreme devotion, which there will 
always be some little group of supremely patriotic men 
ready to make in every healthy state ? Will they not 
belong to the state, and will it not belong continually 
to them ? They will never be lost out of its history. 
They will become its pillars and share its glory, as they 
helped to support its life. 

The same is true about the church. There are the 
multitudes who go in and out, who count the church as 
theirs, who gather from her thought, knowledge, the 
comfort of good company, the sense of safety ; and then 
there are others who think they truly, as the light phrase 



THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 69 

SO deeply means, "belong to the church." They are given 
to it, and no compulsion could separate them from it. 
They are part of its structure. They are its pillars. 
Here and hereafter they can never go out of it. Life 
would mean nothing to them outside the church of 
Christ. 

And, to give just one more example, so it is with 
truth. The men who seek truth for what she has to 
give them, w^ho want to be scholars for the emoluments, 
the honors, the associations, which scholarship will bring, 
these are the men who will turn away from truth so 
soon as she has given them her gifts, and leave herself 
dishonored, — who w^ilJ turn away from any truth which 
has no gifts to give. But, always, there are a few seekers 
w^ho want truth's self, and not her gifts. Once scholars, 
they are scholars always. They really put their lives 
into the structure of the world's advancing knowledge. 
There those lives always remain, like solid stones for the 
scholarship of the years to come to build upon. There 
is no world conceivable to which their souls can go, 
w^here they will not turn to seek what it is possible there 
for souls like theirs to know. 

Thus everywhere, in every interest of human life, there 
is a deeper entrance and a more permanent abiding which 
is reserved for those who have come into the profoundest 
sympathy with its principles, and the most thorough un- 
selfish consecration to its work. Come back, then, from 
these illustrations, to the Christian life, and see there the 
larger exhibition of the same law wdiich they illustrate. 
God is the Governor of all the world. The purpose of 
His government, the one design on which it all pro- 
ceeds, is that the whole world, through obedience to 



70 THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 

Him, should be wrouglit into His likeness, and made 
the utterance of His character. Let that thought dwell 
before your mind, and feel, as you must feel, what a sub- 
lime and glorious picture it involves. Then remember 
that God does not treat the world in one great, vague 
generality. He sees the world all made up of free souls, 
of men and women. The world can become like 
Him by obedience, only as the souls of men and women 
become like Him by obedience. Each soul, your soul 
and mine, must enter into that consummation, must 
realize the idea of that picture by itself, by its own free 
submission ; helped, no doubt, by the movement of souls 
all about it, and by the great promise of the world's sal- 
vation, but yet acting for itself, by its own personal 
resolve. To each soul, then, to yours and mine, God brings 
all the material of this terrestrial struggle, — all the 
temptations, all the disappointments, all the successes, 
all the doubts and perplexities, all the jarring of inter- 
ests, all the chances of hinderance and chances of help 
which come flocking about every new-born life. The 
struggle begins, begins with every living creature, is be- 
ginning to-day with these boys and girls about you, just 
as you can remember that years and years ago it began 
with you. What is it to succeed in that struggle? 
What success shall you set before them to excite their 
hope and energy ? On what success shall you con- 
gratulate yourself ? Is it success in the struggle of life 
simply to get through with decency and die without dis- 
grace or shame ? Is it success in the struggle of life 
just to have so laid hold on God's mercy, to have so 
made our peace with Him, that we know we shall 
not be punished for our sins ? Is it success in the 



THE PILLAK IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 71 

struggle of life even to have so lived in His presence 
that every day has been bright with the sense that He 
was taking care of us ? These things are very good ; 
but if the purpose of God's government of the world 
and of us is what I said, then the real victory in the 
struggle can be nothing less than the accomplishment in 
us of that which it is the object of all His government 
to accomplish in the world. When, truly obedient, we 
have been made like Him whom we obey, then, only 
then, we have overcome in the struggle of life. And 
then we must be pillars in His temple. With wills 
harmonized with His will ; with souls that love and hate 
in truest unison of sympathy with His ; with no pur- 
poses left in us but His purposes, — then we have come 
to what He wants the world to come to. We have taken 
our places in the slowly rising temple of His will. To 
whatever worlds He carries our souls when they shall 
pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds 
these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the 
same great temple ; for it belongs not to this earth alone. 
There can be no end of the universe where God is, to 
which that growing temple does not reach, the temple 
of a creation to be wrought at last into a perfect utter- 
ance of God by a perfect obedience to God. 

my dear friends, that is the victory that is awaiting 
you. Slowly, through all the universe, that temple of 
God is being built. Wherever, in any world, a soul, by 
free-willed obedience, catches the fire of God's likeness, 
it is set into the growing walls, a living stone. When, 
in your hard fight, in your tiresome drudgery, or in your 
terrible temptation, you catch the purpose of your being, 
and give yourself to God, and so give Him the chance to 



72 THE PILLAR IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 

give Himself to you, your life, a living stone, is taken 
up and set into that growing wall. And the other living, 
burning stones claim and welcome and embrace it. 
They bind it in wdth themselves. They make it sure 
with their assurance, and they gather sureness out of 
it. The great wall of divine likeness through human 
obedience grows and grows, as one tried and purified and 
ripened life after another is laid into it ; and down at 
the base, the corner-stone of all, there lies the life of 
Him who, though He was a son, yet learned obedience 
by the things which He suffered, and, being made perfect, 
became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that 
obey Him. 

In what strange quarries and stone-yards the stones 
for that celestial wall are being hewn ! Out of the hill- 
sides of humiliated pride ; deep in the darkness of crushed 
despair ; in the fretting and dusty atmosphere of little 
cares ; in the hard, cruel contacts that man has with man ; 
wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in what- 
ever commonplace and homely ways ; — there God is 
hewing out the pillars for His temple. 0, if the stone 
can only have some vision of the temple of wdiich it is 
to lie a part forever, what patience must fill it as it 
feels the blows of the hammer, and knows that success 
for it is simply to let itself be wrought into what shape 
the Master wills. 

Upon the pillar thus wrought into the temple of 
God's loving kingdom there are three inscriptions. I 
can only in one word ask you to remember what they 
are : " I will write upon him the name of my God, and 
the name of the city of my God, and my new name.'' 



THE PILLAE IN GOD'S TEMPLE. 73 

The soul that in obedience to God is growing into His 
likeness, is dedicated to the divine love, to the hope of 
the perfect society, and to the ever new knowledge of 
redemption and the great Eedeemer. Those are its hopes ; 
and, reaching out forever and ever, all through eternity, 
those hopes it never can exhaust. Those writings on the 
pillar shall burn with purer and brighter fire the longer 
that the pillar stands in the temple of Him whom Jesus 
calls " My God." 

May all this great promise ennoble and illumine the 
struggle of our life ; keep us from ever thinking that it 
is mean and little ; lift us above its details while it keeps 
us forever faithful to them ; and give us victory at last 
through Him who has already overcome. 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

* **The light of the hody is the eye: if, therefore, thine eye be single, 
thy whole body shall be full of light." — Matt. vi. 22. 

It sometimes seems to me as if, in our Christian ear- 
nestness and eagerness to establish the authority of the 
words of Jesus, and to enforce their application, we 
were in danger of neglecting to seek their deepest mean- 
ing and full interpretation. These three questions every 
thoughtful and conscientious disciple must ask about 
his Master: first, Why should I believe His teach- 
ings ? third, "What ought my belief in His teachings to 
make me do ? but certainly also, second, What do His 
teachings mean ? Without the serious asking and care- 
ful answering of this second question, the answering of 
the first question must be well-nigh useless, and the 
correct and full answering of the third question must 
be, in great degree, impossible. 

All this is true of every word of Jesus ; but it is 
specially true with regard to certain great words of His, 
in which it seems as if He summed up the principles 
of His teaching, and gave a comprehensive statement of 
His work. Such words there are ; words which rise like 
mountains in the midst of His discourse, and seem to 
draw up, into conclusive points, the whole expanse of 
His great teaching. They are not deliberate and formal. 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 75 

He does not turn aside from His work of saving the 
world, to deliver lectures on theology. These compre- 
hensive words of His grow naturally out of the ordinary 
circumstances and conversations into which He fell ; 
but in them there meet the currents of His thouo-ht, 
and the great final truths of man and God lie open to 
the mind that reverently tries to understand them. 
Surely such words tempt and deserve our most reverent 
and loving study. 

It is one of these words of Jesus that I have chosen 
for my text this morning. I choose it because it seems 
to me to have something to say very directly to some 
of the questions about the possibility of knowing about 
God, and the way of knowing about God, which one 
hears asked with most astonishing frequency and most 
impressive earnestness in these days and places. In 
this utterance Jesus, I think, makes it wonderfully clear 
how man must hope to know those spiritual things, 
without some knowledge of which the heart of man is 
not and cannot be content ; after which man is forever 
struggling ; and the despair of which makes the great 
gloom which in these days seems, to some prophets, to 
be settling down upon the human soul. 

Jesus builds all His teaching upon an illustrative 
figure which every one could then, and can always, un- 
derstand. " The light of the body is the eye," He said. 
Try to get the picture back before your mind. These 
words are part of the Sermon on the Mount. On a 
bright, fresh morning, Jesus is sitting half-way up a 
hillside in Galilee, with a group of attentive hearers 
clustered at his side. All around Him is the radiant 
landscape. Almost at the mountain's foot the lake of 



76 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

Galilee is flashing in the morning sun. The soft 
rounded hills roll away like waves on every side, the 
quiet valleys nestling in between them. Here and 
there the little white villages give life and movement to 
the scene. The birds fly through the air ; the cattle are 
plodding at their tasks ; all the earth seems bright and 
fresh and clear, full of vitality and beauty. And then 
here, close around Him, are these men with all their 
sensitiveness, all their human power to enjoy and un- 
derstand this world, — these men whose understanding 
and enjoyment of it seem to give worthiness and dig- 
nity to all this outward nature. They are the other 
half of the picture in the mind of Jesus. Nature and 
man, these two, make up the world for Him. The 
hills and rocks and trees and beasts and villages, and 
the sun shining on them all, — that on one side ; and on 
the other, — man, with his power of knowing what all 
these things mean, of loving them, of thinking about 
them, of using them. The world of nature radiant with 
light ; the soul of man rich in intelligence, — these two 
facing and claiming each other on that bright morning 
in Syria, as they have faced and claimed each other 
every day since God said, " Let us make man," and 
Adam began to live in Eden. And now, as Jesus looks 
at all this, He begins to praise the human eye. " The 
light of the body is the eye,'' He says. What does He 
mean by that ? Is it not that He is rejoicing in the 
one appointed channel through wdiich these two halves 
of the world may come into connection ? Nature and 
man must stand apart, not two halves of one world, 
but two separate worlds, were it not for that marvellous 
and precious avenue of sight which brings the two 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 77 

together, and lets the man, with his inner power of 
knowledge, know the outer world. Through it, the Lake 
of Galilee and beautiful Mount Tabor in the distance, — 
aye, and the dear, sweet face of the Lord himself, — flow 
in upon the soul of John, and become a part of him. 
Without the eye the world might still be real ; but it 
must be forever unknowable to this man, able to know 
it, but sitting in the prison of his sightlessness where 
all the glory cannot reach him. He opens the window 
of his eye and it all comes pouring in ; runs through 
his frame and finds out his intelligence; says to his 
brain : " Here I am, know me ! " Says to his heart : 
" Here I am, love me ! " To the man sitting in 
darkness, the whole bright world has sprung to life; 
and the window of the prison, the gateway of the en- 
tering glory, the light of the body is the eye. 

So Jesus spoke ; and we can well imagine that His 
words awoke some new grateful delight in their own 
blessed power of vision among those thoughtful men who 
heard Him. But it was not for that purpose that he had 
spoken. He was not lecturing on optics. The visible 
world, and its entrance to the human intelligence through 
the eye, was but an illustration. His thought was 
aimed through the illustration at that which it was the 
purpose of His life to teach mankind. He was thinking 
of the world of unseen, invisible, spiritual life ; and what 
He meant to say by His suggestive picture must have 
been that that world, too,. must and could testify itself, 
report itself to the human intelligence through its ap- 
propriate channel of communication, just exactly as the 
w^orld of visible nature manifests and reports itseK 
through the organ of the eye. Now it is just the exist- 



78 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

ence of that spiritual world, and the possibility of man's 
being in communication with it, intelligently knowing 
it, intelligently loving it, — that it is about which 
man's profoundest hopes and fears have always clustered, 
about which they are clustering to-day, perhaps more 
anxiously than ever yet. It is a world certainly that is 
conceivable. The invisible may at least be imagined, 
whether it can be believed or not. All man's mental 
history bears witness that he can picture to himself a 
world in which the true existences are souls instead of 
bodies ; where the forces are not those which any physics 
can measure, but the temptations and aspirations which 
only the spiritual life can feel ; where the issues are not 
those of physical .growth or catastrophe, but of the 
culture or decay of character ; and whose central sun, the 
source and fountain of whose life, is not a burning globe 
hung in the heavens, but a personal God who feeds all 
the souls of His children with His love, and guides 
them by His wisdom, and blesses or punishes them by 
His judgment. Those are the components of that spirit- 
ual world, the human soul and God. No man has ever 
seen either of them. They cannot report themselves 
through the eye. But Jesus says that the world of 
which they are the constituents is a real world ; and 
that though the eye cannot give them admission to the 
intelligence to which all worlds must report themselves 
before they can become part of the life of man, there is 
an organ which is to this world of spiritual life what 
the eye of the body is to a world of trees and lakes. 

And what then is that organ ? The name by which 
it is best known is Conscience ; and, though we may 
have to remind ourselves before we finish that some of 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 79 

the ordinary uses of that word make it too small and 
meagre, yet we may freely use the name of Conscience 
to represent that organ which stands between the intel- 
ligence of man and the spiritual world, just as the eye 
stands between the intelligence of man and the world of 
physical nature, and brings the two together. This is 
'Christ's doctrine in many places. He that uses his 
conscience, he that means to do what is right out of 
obedience to God, shall come to the knowledge of 
God and of his own soul. That is the plain, unfigura- 
tive statement of the doctrine which He is constantly 
reiterating. 

And we can see how His doctrine has its root in the 
nature of things. Conscience is the faculty by which 
we judge of acts as right or wrong. It follows then, of 
necessity, that all knowledge of the deeper natures of 
things by which they become possibly the instruments 
of righteousness or wickedness, and all knowledge of 
those deeper and higher parts of the universe which are 
capable of being known only in their moral characters, 
must of necessity come in through some such organ or 
faculty as this, which each man knows that he pos- 
sesses, and by which he says of characters, " This is 
good or bad,'' just as by his eye he says of the branch 
of a tree, " This is straight or crooked." Is not that 
clear ? A tree is growing outside your window. You, 
who inside the window are sitting with your face 
toward the tree, are blind. Some miracle touches you 
and you get your sight. Instantly that tree leaps into 
being for you, and by the channel of your opened eye- 
sight pours the recognition of itself through all your 
intelligence. Just so God, — a Being whose essence is 



80 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

morality, a Being who is good and who loves or hates 
all things in the world according as they are good or 
bad, — God is here before you; and you have no open 
conscience. You do not care whether things are right 
or wrong. You have no perception of the essential 
difference between right and wrong. You do not feel 
the dreadfulness of being bad, the beauty of being good. 
You are not trying to do right. You are not trying to 
keep from doing wrong. By and by, suddenly or 
gradually, all that changes. Your shut conscience 
opens. I will not ask now what makes it open. I 
will not speak now of the powder which the world of 
God beyond the conscience may have to tempt the 
conscience into activity. Let us simply watch the 
fact. You do begin to feel the difference of right and 
wrong. You begin to try to do right. And then it is, 
in the pursuance of that effort, that there become gradu- 
ally impressed upon your intelligence certain things 
which had found no recoo^nition there before. The 
spiritual nature of the world ; that all this mass of 
things and events is fitted for and naturally struggles 
towards the education of character ; — the spiritual na- 
ture of man ; the truth that man is fully satisfied only 
with what satisfies his soul, only with character, and 
with an endless chance for that character to grow ; — 
and God ; the existence, behind all standards and laws, 
of righteousness, of a perfectly righteous One, from 
Whom they all proceed and by Whom those who try 
to follow them are both judged and helped ; — these are 
the before unseen realities which come pressing into your 
intelligence, tempting, demanding your recognition 
when your conscience is once open, when you have 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 81 

once begun to live in the desire and struggle to do 
right. 

Do you not see then what I mean when I say that 
the conscience stands betw^een man's power of knowl- 
edge and the spiritual world, just as the eye stands 
between man's power of knowledge and the world of 
visible nature ? It is the opened or unopened window 
through which flows the glorious knowledge of God and 
heaven ; or outside of which that knowledge waits, as 
the sun with its glory or the flower with its beauty 
waits outside the closed eye of a blind or sleeping 
man. 

In both the cases, — in the sight through the eye and 
the sight through the conscience, — the intelligence which 
waits within, and does not yet see for itself, is not, of 
course, shut out from testimony. If a man is thoroughly 
blind and never sees the sun himself, other men wdio 
do see it with their open eyes may, no doubt, come and 
tell him of it ; and in his darkened soul, if he believes 
them, there grows up some dim, distorted image of the 
sun which he has never seen. Nay, other senses have 
some stray messages to tell him of the world, whose full 
revelation can come only through the opened eye. He 
feels the sun in its warmth ; he smells the rose in its 
sweetness ; he tastes the flavor of the peach. Through 
these chinks there steal in some tidings of the wondrous 
world, even while the window through which it can 
report itself entirely is shut and shuttered. I am 
impressed by seeing how exactly all this has its corre- 
spondent in man's knowledge of the universe of spirit- 
ual things. There too, througli testimony and through 
sideway and accidental intimations, as it were, some 

6 



82 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

knowledge comes even when conscience is shut and no 
struggle to do right is urging it open to its work. 
Some man who knows that there is a God, and that the 
soul is precious and immortal, comes and tells me so. 
The Bible speaks it with such power that I cannot dis- 
believe. Nay, the things that are spiritual bring their 
own sidelong testimonies of themselves. They touch 
my sense of beauty. They make me feel how good it 
would be for the world if they were true. I hear their 
movement in the depths of history. In all these ways 
they do not leave themselves unwitnessed. These are 
the ways in which, while I am most unconscientious and 
least anxious to do right, I may still know that God 
and spirit are the basis and the issue of the world. 
Yet still, in spite of all this, there stands the separate 
glory of the revelation of that day when to me, at last 
beginning to try to do right, the God whose faint 
reports have come to me pours in upon my opened 
soul the glorious conviction of His righteousness and 
love ; and my soul, in which I have half believed, 
becomes the centre of my life ; becomes my life, that 
for which all the other parts of me are made. Then, in 
the knowledge which pours through my opened con- 
science, then I know with an assurance which makes all 
the knowledge that I had before seem but a guess and 
dim suspicion. 

And there is yet another point of resemblance in this 
comparison of the eye and the conscience, which is 
striking. When one declares thus, that through the con- 
science man arrives at the knowledge of unseen things, 
and conceptions of God and spiritual force and immor- 
tality reveal themselves to the intelligence, at once the 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 83 

suggestion comes from some one who is listening, " Can 
we be sure of the reality of what thus seems to be made 
known ? How can Ave be sure that what the conscience 
sends in to the understanding are not mere creations of 
its own ; things which it thinks exist because it seems 
to need them ; mere forms in which it has been led to 
clothe with outward and substantial life its own emo- 
tions ? " Everybody knows such questions. They are 
thrown up, on every side, to the man who, trying to do 
right, thinks that through his effort he has found God. 
They come to him not merely from other men ; but his 
own heart, suspecting its own faiths and hopes, suggests 
them. But now think how exactly they are the same 
questions which have always haunted man's whole 
thought about his vision of the world of nature. How 
often we are told that none of us can prove that all 
these things which our eyes see have any real existence 
outside our sense of sight ; that all that we are sure of 
is certain sensations and impressions in our own brains. 
Are not then the questions which haunt the conscience 
the same as those which haunt the eye ? And as the 
eye deals with its questions, so will the conscience 
always deal with its. A conviction of the reality of 
what it sees, which is a part of its consciousness that no 
suspicion can disturb ; a use of its knowledge, which 
brings ever a more and more complete assurance of its 
trustworthiness, — these are the practical issue of every 
such question with regard to what the brain sees through 
the eye ; and the same will be the practical issue of 
every question with regard to what the soul sees through 
the conscience. At least we may say this, that it would 
be a very deep confidence indeed if the soul felt as sure 



84 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

of God as the mind feels of nature. This we feel very 
deeply in these days, when to so many minds the cer- 
tainty of nature seems to stand in strong contrast with 
the uncertainty of God. It is much if we can see that 
the doubts which are suggested as to the sight of the 
soul, are but the same with the doubts which we easily 
overcome when we are dealing with the sight of the 
body. 

Before the parallel, which Christ's illustration sug- 
gests, is quite completely apprehended, there is one 
thing more which we ought to observe ; and the obser- 
vation of it may perhaps touch a difficulty which, I dare 
say, has suggested itself to some minds while I have 
been speaking. We have talked as if all that was neces- 
sary, in order that the eye of man should see the world 
of nature, was that the eye should be open ; but we 
know very well that something else is needed. The 
world of nature may be there in all its beauty, but the 
openest eye will not see it, if it be not turned that way. 
The eye, wide open, turned to the blank wall, will not 
see the mountain and the meadow. " Open your eyes 
and look here," we say to a child into whose intelligence 
we want the wonder of nature to be poured. And now, 
is there anything that corresponds to this second neces- 
sity in the case of conscience and its perception of 
spiritual truth ? Surely there is. There is an openness 
of conscience, a desire and struggle to do right, which 
is distinctly turned away from God and the world of 
spiritual things, so that, even if they were there, it 
would not see them. On the other hand, there is an 
openness of conscience, a desire and struggle to do right, 
which is turned towards God and the supernatural, 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 85 

which is expectant of spiritual revelation ; and to that 
conscience the spiritual revelation comes. This does 
not amount to saying that the conscience sees what it 
wants to see. It is very different from that. Many 
things the conscience, like the eye, wants to see, and 
does not see them because they do not exist. But those 
things which do exist, — though they be the plainest of 
realities, — no conscience can see which, with the greatest 
scrupulousness and faithfulness, is turned the other way 
and expecting revelation from another quarter. Does 
this explain nothing ? If we can recall a time when 
we did our duty just as faithfully as we knew how, and 
found all our duty a drudgery and toil, — a time when 
conscience was intensely, almost morbidly scrupulous, 
and would not rest ; and yet, when, for a purpose of 
duty, we never looked, or tried to look, beyond ourselves 
and the world in which we lived ; when we tried to be 
good because we were ashamed of wickedness, or because 
wickedness we knew would bring us pain ; and if, 
remembering that all our struggle after goodness in 
those days brought us no sight of God, we ask ourselves 
what such a failure of the truly open conscience meant, 
is there no suggestion of an answer here ? It was the 
open eye looking down and not up, looking away 
from God and not to Him. Of course it did not see 
Him. When the desire to do right began to turn itself 
and to look up ; when it began to desire to obey and 
please, and depend upon, whatever highest being in the 
universe might have anything to do with that soul and 
its struggles, then the soul knew God. The man who 
is not trying to do right at all may stand with his blind 
conscience in the very blaze of God's presence and not 



86 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

see Him. The man who is trying to do right in selfish- 
ness and self-dependence may toil on unenlightened 
and unaided. The man who is trying to do right God- 
ward, who in all his scrupulousness is devoutly 
humble and hopeful of things higher than himself, to 
him, through the openness of his faithful conscience, 
the vision comes, and he sees God. 

My friends, may we not pause a moment here in the 
midst of our definitions, and let ourselves see what a 
great truth this is that we have reached ? Is it then 
true that every man carries about with him such a 
capacity as this ? This impulse, the necessity of doing 
right, of struggling with temptation, which has so often 
seemed to make life a hard slavery, — see what it really 
is ! It is the opening of the organ through which the 
whole world of unseen spiritual light and life, all the 
being and power and love of God, all our own untold 
future in the regions of immortal growth, may flow in 
on us and become real and influential in our life. That 
boy keeping himself true when other boys are tempting 
him to be false, keeping himself lofty when other boys 
are tempting him to be base, he is no toiler in a tread- 
mill which he would be well out of if he dared but leave 
it. He is a climber of the delectable mountains from 
whose height he shall see heaven and God. And, as he 
climbs, the promise of the vision is already making his 
dull eyes strong and fine, so that when the vision comes 
he shall be able to look right into its deep and glorious 
heart. " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God." We praise the hand, the ear, the eye, the 
brain, for all the knowledge they so wonderfully bring- 
to man. Is there among them all any organ which a 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 87 

man should honor and glorify and enshrine in such 
reverent obedience as this/ the Conscience; if indeed, 
through it, God and the unseen world of God may come 
to him, and his poor humanity grow rich in knowing 
them ? 

And so we are led quietly onward to that which 
Jesus teaches in the text which has given us our start- 
ing point for all this long discussion, — " If thine eye 
be single thy whole body shall be full of light ; " the 
critical importance of a pure, true conscience, of a 
steady, self-sacrificing struggle to do right Godward. 
So only can the channel be kept open, through which 
the knowledge of God and of the spiritual things which 
belong to Him, can enter into our souls. 0, my dear 
friends, has there been nothing in our experience which 
has taught us to understand that and to believe it ? Is 
there one of us who cannot remember how, in the hours 
when he tried to do what was right, the possibility of 
God, perhaps the certainty of God, grew clear to him, 
and it seemed to him as if the world opened, and spirit- 
ual things bore direct testimony of themselves ? And is 
there one of us who has not the other recollection also, 
of hours when, in the tumult of indulged passion, or in 
times when we let ourselves be mean, or when we cared 
only for ourselves, the whole world of spiritual being, 
God, heaven, immortality, the power of divine love, the 
vast, infinite hopes, aye, even the spiritual quality of our 
own soul itself, — all seemed to fade away from us as 
the landscape fades away out of the sight of the eye 
when blindness drops upon it ? StiU, out of the dark- 
ened landscape may come mysterious sounds which fill 
the soul with fear ; and still, out of the hidden world 



88 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

of spiritual life may come to the sinful and unbelieving 
soul whispers of dread which make him tremble at the 
unseen presence of the awful verities which he does not 
believe in. But all true, healthy, inspiring faith, — all 
knowledge that can live by love and open into action, 
grows dim to the soul, dimmer and ever dimmer as it 
gives itself up to sin. 

All this seems to me to throw so much light upon the 
nature and purpose of Christ's incarnation. Men say : 
" He came to show us God.'' Other men say, '' No, 
but He came to save us from our sins." Are not the 
two really one ? It would be easy to ask whether He 
who showed men God must not save them from their 
sins. But — what is to our purpose now to ask — must 
not He who saved men from their sins show men God ? 
The work of Jesus was to make men do right Godward ; 
to make men do right not merely that the world might 
be more quiet and peaceable and decent, but in order 
that into souls thus open through their consecrated con- 
sciences, the knowledge of that God might enter in 
whose knowledge is eternal life. 

Eemember how Jesus always found, in His own obe- 
dience to His Father, the secret of His Father's perpet- 
ual revelation of Himself to Him. " The Father hath 
not left me alone, for I do always those things that 
please Him," He said. Those words are the key to it 
all. He did right Godward. He did always those 
things that pleased God. In Him was neither the ab- 
stract meditation and study of divine things which thinks 
that the knowledge of them is like the knowledge of the 
rocks or the stars, something quite independent of 
moral conditions in the knower ; nor, on the other hand, 



THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 89 

was there in Him that mere slavery to duty on its 
lower grounds of economy and prudence, which often 
paralyzes the conscience and shuts it up as a channel 
for the higher knowledge. He did right God ward. And 
if in the wilderness, when the devil was tempting Him, 
He came for any instant near to faltering, a large part of 
His strength of resistance must have been in the cer- 
tainty that if He yielded and sinned, the door would 
close through which the perpetual knowledge of His 
Father was forever flowing into Him and filling Him 
with rich joy and peace. 

And what His own life was, Jesus is always trying to 
make the lives of His disciples be. He is always trying 
to lead men to do right with hopes and expectations 
God ward. Men debate again whether Jesus is a human 
example and teacher, or a divine Power and Eedeemer. 
Surely He is both, and between the two there is no con- 
flict. They are most congruous. Both are parts of 
that completeness of life by which He would draw the 
conscience of man upward and make it clear and pure, 
so that through it the knowledge of God should descend. 
He taught men holiness by His example and His words ; 
and He declared, in all He was and did, the love ot 
God ; and the result of all of it, to John and Mary and 
Nicodemus and the Magdalen and countless other un- 
named disciples, was that they saw God through con- 
sciences made scrupulous and holy, and turned to God 
by the attraction of His manifested love. 

I turn to the consummate act of His life, the act in 
which His life was all summed up, and I see all this in 
its completeness. I look at Jesus on the cross. I see 
Him there convicting sin by the sight of its terrific con- 



90 THE EYE OF THE SOUL. 

sequence. I see Him also drawing men's souls up, 
away from the earth and from themselves, up to God, 
by that amazing sign of how God loved them. And 
when I turn from looking at the sufferer and look into 
the faces of those men and women to whom His suffer- 
ing has brought its power, I see how, in the struggle 
against sin under the power of the love of God, to 
which the cross has summoned them, they are knowing 
God ; how, in St. Paul's great words, " the God of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, is giving unto 
them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowl- 
edge of Him, the eyes of their understanding being 
enlightened." I see all that in the group around the 
cross on Calvary ; and all that also in the host of Chris- 
tian souls who have been filled with the knowledge of 
God, through the sacrifice of Christ, in all the ages 
since. 

I should be more glad than I can say if I could know 
that I had opened up to any one of you to-day a hope 
that you might know the things of the spiritual life, the 
things of God, of which many men are telling you now 
that they are unknowable by man. That you must not 
believe. So long as man is able to do right Godward, 
to keep his conscience pure and true and reverent, set 
upon doing the best things on the highest grounds, he 
carries with him an eye through which the everlasting 
light may, and assuredly will, shine in upon his soul. 
Such faithfulness and consecration and hope may God 
give to all, that we may know Him more and more. 



VI. 

THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

**An(i a vision appeared unto Paul in the night. There stood a man 
of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying : Come over into Macedonia 
and help us." — Acts xvi. 9. 

It was the moment when a new work was opening 
before the great apostle ; nothing less than the carrying 
of the gospel into Europe. He had passed through 
Asia and was sleeping at Troas, with the Mediterranean 
waters sounding in his ears ; and, visible across them, 
the islands which were the broken fringes of another 
continent. We cannot think that .this was the first 
time that it had come into Paul's mind to think of 
christianizing Europe. We can well believe that on 
the past day he had stood and looked westward, and 
thought of the souls of men as hardly any man since 
him has known how to think of them, and longed to 
win for his Master the unknown world that lay beyond 
the waters. But now, in his sleep, a vision comes, and 
that completes whatever preparation may have been 
begun before, and in the morning he is ready to start. 

And so it is that before every well-done work the 
vision comes. We dream before we accomplish. We 
start with the glorified image of what we are to do shin- 
ing before our eyes, and it is its splendor that encour- 
ages and entices us through all the drudgery of the 
labor that we meet. The captain dreams out his battle 



92 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

sleeping in his tent. The quick and subtle-brained in- 
ventor has visions of his new wonder of machinery 
before the first toothed wheel is fitted to its place. You 
merchants see the great enterprise that is to make your 
fortune break out of vacancy and develop all its richness 
to you, as if it were a very inspiration from above. 
Nay, what is all our boyhood, that comes before our 
life, and thinks and pictures to itself what life shall be, 
that fancies and resolves and is impatient, — what is it 
but just the vision before the work, the dream of 
Europe coming to many a young life, as it sleeps at 
Troas, on the margin of the sea ? The visions before the 
work ; it is their strength which conquers the difficulties, 
and lifts men up out of the failures, and redeems the 
tawdriness or squalidness of the labor that succeeds. 

And such preparatory visions, the best of them, take 
the form and tone of importunate demands. The man 
hears the world crying out for just this thing which he 
is going to start to do to-morrow morning. This battle 
is to save the cause. This new invention is to turn the 
tide of wealth. This mighty bargain is to make trade 
another thing. The world must have it. And the long 
vision of boyhood is in the same strain too. There is 
something in him, this new boy says, which other men 
have never had. His new life has its own distinctive 
difference. He will fill some little unfilled necessary 
place. He will touch some little untouched spring. 
The world needs him. It may prove afterwards that 
the vision was not wholly true. It may seem as if, 
after all, only another duplicate life was added to a mil- 
lion others, which tlie world might very well have done 
without ; but still the power of the vision is not soon 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 93 

exhausted, the mortifying confession is not made at 
once, and before it wholly fades away the vision gives a 
power and momentum to the life which the life never 
wholly loses. 

And indeed we well may doubt whether the vision 
was a false one, even when the man himself, in his 
colder and less hopeful years, comes to think and say 
that it was. We well may doubt whether, with the in- 
finite difference of personal life and character which 
God sends into the world, every true and earnest man 
has not some work that he alone can do, some place 
that he alone can fill ; whether there is not somewhere 
a demand that he alone can satisfy ; whether the w^orld 
does not need him, is not calling to him, " Come and 
help us/' as he used to hear it in the vision that w^as 
shown to him upon the sea-shore. 

So much we say of preparatory visions in general. I 
Avant to look with you at this vision of Paul's, and see 
how far we can understand its meaning, and how much 
we can learn from it. A Macedonian comes before the 
apostle of Christ, and asks him for the gospel. The 
messenger is the representative, not of Macedonia only, 
but of all Europe. Macedonia is only the nearest coun- 
try into which the traveller from Asia must cross first. 
There he stands in his strange dress, with his strange 
western look, with his strange gestures, before the w^ak- 
ing or the sleeping Paul, begging in a strange language, 
which only the pentecostal power of spiritual appreci- 
ative sympathy can understand, — " Come over and help 
us." But what was this Macedonia and this Europe 
which he represented ? Did it want the gospel ? Had 
it sent him out because it was restless and cravino' and 



94 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

uneasy, and could not be satisfied until it heard the 
truth about Jesus Christ, which Paul of Tarsus had to 
tell ? Nothing of that kind whatsoever. Europe was 
going on perfectly contented in its heathenism. Its 
millions knew of nothing that was wanting to their hap- 
piness. They were full of their business and their 
pleasures, scheming for little self-advancements, taking 
care of their families, living in their tastes or their pas- 
sions ; a few questioning with themselves deep problems 
of perplexed philosophy, a few hanging votive wreaths 
on the cold altars of marble gods and goddesses, some 
looking upward and some downward and some inward 
for their life; but none looking eastward to where the 
apostle was sleeping, or, farther east, beyond him, to 
where the new sun of the new religion was making the 
dark sky bright with promise on that silent night. So 
far as we can know there was not one man in Mace- 
donia who wanted Paul When he went over there the 
next day, he found what ? — a few bigoted Jews, some 
crazy soothsayers and witches, multitudes of indifferent 
heathen, a few open-hearted men and women who heard 
and believed what he had to tell them, but not one who 
had believed before, or wanted to believe, — not one 
who met him at the ship and said, '' Come, we have 
waited for you ; we sent for you ; we want your help." 
But what then means the man from Macedonia ? If he 
was not the messenger of the Macedonians, who was he ? 
Who sent him ? Ah ! there is just the key to it. God 
sent him. Not the Macedonians themselves. They did 
not want the gospel. God sent him, because He saw 
that they needed the gospel. The mysterious man was 
an utterance not of the conscious want but of the un- 



THE MAN OF IVIACEDONIA. 95 

conscious need of those poor people. A heart and being 
of them, deeper and more essential than they knew 
themselves, took shape in some strange method by the 
power of God, and came and stood before the sleeping 
minister and said, " Come over and help us." The 
" man of Macedonia " was the very heart and essence 
of Macedonia, the profoundest capacities of truth and 
goodness and faith and salvation which Macedonia 
itself knew nothing of, but which were its real self. 
These were what took form and pleaded for satisfaction. 
It is not easy to state it ; but look at Europe as it has 
been since, see the new life which has come forth, the 
profound spirituality, the earnest faith, the thoughtful 
devotion, the active unselfishness which has been the 
Europe of succeeding days ; and then we may say that 
this, and more than this, all that is yet to come, was 
what God saw lying hidden and hampered, and set free 
to go and beg for help and release, from the disciple 
who held the key which has unlocked the fetters. 

And is not this a very noble and a very true idea ? 
It is the unsatisfied soul, the deep need, all the more 
needy because the outside life, perfectly satisfied with 
itself, does not know that it is needy all the time, — it is 
this that God hears pleading. This soul is the true 
Macedonia. And so this, as the representative Mace- 
donian, the man of Macedonia, brings the appeal. How 
noble and touching is the picture which this gives us of 
God. The unconscious needs of the world are all ap- 
peals and cries to Him. He does not wait to hear the 
voice of conscious want. The mere vacancy is a beg- 
ging after fulness ; the mere poverty is a supplication 
for wealth ; the mere darkness cries for light. Think 



96 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

then a moment of God's infinite view of the capacities 
of His universe, and consider what a great cry must be 
forever going up into His ears to which His soul longs 
and endeavors to respond. Wherever any man is 
capable of being better or wiser or purer than he is, 
God hears the soul of that man crying out after the 
purity and wisdom and goodness which is its right, and 
of which it is being defrauded by the angry passions or 
the stubborn will. When you shut out any light or 
truth from your inner self, by the shutters of avarice 
or indolence Vhich your outer, superficial, worldly self 
so easily slips up, — that inner self, robbed, starved, 
darkened, not conscious of its want, hidden away there 
under the hard surface of your worldliness, has yet a 
voice which God can hear, accusing before Him your 
own cruelty to yourself. What a strong piteous wail of 
dissatisfaction must He hear from this world wdiich 
seems so satisfied with itself. Wherever a nation is 
sunk in slavery or barbarism it cannot be so perfectly 
contented with its chains but that He hears the soul of 
it crying out after liberty and civilization. Wherever a 
man or a body of men is given to bigotry and prejudice, 
the love of darkness cannot be so complete but that He 
hears the human heart begging for the light that it was 
made for. Wherever lust is ruling, He hears the appeal 
of a hidden, outraged purity somewhere under the foul 
outside, and sends to it His help. Alas for us if God 
helped us only when we knew we needed Him and went 
to Him with full self-conscious wants ! Alas for us if 
every need which we know not, had not a voice for 
Him and did not call Him to us ! Did the world want 
the Savior ? Was it not into a blindness so dark that 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 97 

it did not know that it was blind, into a wickedness so 
wicked that it was not looking for a Savior, that the 
Savior came ? And when we look back can we say that 
we wanted the Lord who has taken us into His service , 
and made us His children ? Tell me, Christian, was 
it a conscious want, — was it not the cry of a silent 
need, that brought the Master to your side at first and 
so drew you to His ? " He first loved us ! " Our hope is 
in the ear which God has for simple need ; so that mere 
emptiuess cries out to Him for filling, mere poverty for 
wealth. 

I cannot help turning aside a moment here just to 
bid you think what the world would be if men were 
like God in this respect. Suppose that we, all of us, 
heard every kind of need crying to us with an appeal 
which we could not resist. Out of every suffering and 
constraint and wrong, suppose there came to us, as out 
of Macedonia there came to Paul, a ghost, a vision, pre- 
senting at once to us the fact of need and the possibility 
of what the needy man might be if the need were satis- 
fied and the chain broken. Suppose such visions came 
and stood around us crying out ''Help us." You go 
through some wretched street and not a beggar touches 
your robe or looks up in your face, but the bare, dread- 
ful presence of poverty cries out of every tumbling 
shanty and every ragged pretence of dress. You go 
among the ignorant, and out from under their contented 
ignorance their hidden power of knowledge utters itself 
and says " teach us/' It is not enough for you that 
the oppressed are satisfied with their oppression. That 
only makes you the more eager to feed into conscious- 
ness and strength that hunger after liberty which they 

■ 7 



98 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. X 

are too degraded to feel. You see a sick man contented 
with dogged acquiescence and submission, and you 
want to show him the possibility and to lead him to 
the realization, of a resignation and delight in suf- ^ 
fering which he never dreams of now. Mere pain is 
itself a cry for sympathy ; mere darkness an appeal for 
light. 

" Ah/' do you say, " that must be a most uncomfort- 
able way of living. The world forever clamoring for 
help ! Those things are not my mission, not my work. 
If the world does not know its needs I will not tell 
it. Let it rest content. That is best for it " ? But 
there have been, and, thank God, there are, men of a 
better stuff than you ; men who cannot know of a need 
in all the world, from the need of a child fallen in the 
street, whose tears are to be wiped away, to the need 
of a nation lying in sin, whose wickedness must be 
rebuked to its face at the cost of the rebuker's life ; 
there are men who cannot know of a need in all the 
world without its taking the shape of a personal appeal 
to them. They must go and do this thing. There are 
such men who seem to have a sort of magnetic attrac- 
tion for all wrongs and pains. All grievances and woes 
fly to them to be righted and consoled. They at- 
tract need. They who cannot sleep at Troas but the 
soul of Macedonia finds them out and comes across and 
begs them '^ Come and help us." We all must be 
thankful to know that there are such men among us, 
however little we may feel that we are such men our- 
selves ; nay, however little we may want to be such 
men. 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 99 

But let US come a little nearer to tlie truth that we 
are studying. It seems to me that all which we have 
said about the man of Macedonia includes the real state 
of the case with reference to the essential need of the 
human soul for the Gospel. We often hear of the 
great cry of human nature for the truth of Christ, man 
craving the Savior. What does it mean ? The world 
moves on and every face looks satisfied. Eating and 
drinking and working and studying, loving and hating, 
struggling and enjoying, — those things seem to be suffi- 
cient for men's wants. There is no discontent that 
men will tell you of. They are not conscious of a need. 
I stop you, the most careless hearer in the church 
to-night, as you go out, and say " Are you satisfied ? " 
and honestly you answer " Yes ! My business and my 
family, they are enough for me " ; " Do you feel any 
need of Christ ? " and honestly you answer " No ! Some- 
times I fear that it will go ill with me by and by, if I do 
not seek Him, but at present I do not want Him ; I do 
not see how I should be happier if I had Him here." 
That is about the honest answer which your heart 
would make. But what then ? Just as below the 
actual Macedonia which did not care for Paul nor want 
him, there was another possible, ideal Macedonia which 
God saw and called forth and sent in a visionary form 
to beg the help it could not do without, so to that civil 
flippant answerer of my question at the church door I 
could say : " Below this outer self of yours which ig 
satisfied with family and business, there is another self 
which you know nothing of but which God sees, which 
He values as your truest and deepest self, which to His 
sight is a real person pleading so piteously for help that 



100 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

He has not been able to resist its pleading, but has sent 
His ministers, has sent His Bible, . — nay, has come Him- 
self to satisfy it with that spiritual aid it cannot do 
without/' I can imagine a look of perplexity and won- 
der, a turning back, an inward search for this inner self, 
a strange, bewildered doubt whether it exists at all. 

And yet, this coming forth of inner selves with their 
demands, is it not the one method of all progress ? 
What does it mean when a slave, long satisfied with 
being fed and housed and clothed, some day comes to 
the knowledge that he was meant to be free, and can 
rest satisfied as a slave no longer ? What is it when 
the savage's inner nature is touched by the ambition of 
knowledge, and he cannot rest until he grows to be a 
scholar ? What is it when a hard, selfish man's crust 
is broken, and a sensitive, tender soul uncovered, which 
makes life a wretched thing to him from that moment, 
unless he has somebody besides himself to love and 
help and cherish ? These men would not believe an 
hour before that such appetites and faculties were in 
them ; but God knew them, and heard them all the time ; 
and long before the men dreamed of it themselves, 
the slave >vas crying out to Him for freedom, and the 
savage for culture, and the tyrant for love. Now is it 
strange that, also unknown to you, there should be other 
appetites and faculties in you w^hich need a satisfaction ? 
The Bible says there are. Experience says there are. 
Let us see if we can find some of them. 

1. The first need is a God to love and worship. Any' 
body who looks wisely back into history sees, I think, 
regarding man's need of a God to love and worship, just 
what I have stated to be true. Not that man was 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 101 

always seeking God, or always miserable, when he did 
not find Him. One sees multitudes of men, and some- 
times whole periods, or whole countries, that seem to 
have no sense of want whatever, to have settled down 
into the purest materialism and the most utter self- 
content. But he sees also indications everywhere that 
the need was present, even where the want was not felt. 
He sees the idea of God keeping a sort of persistent foot- 
hold in the human heart, which proves to him that it 
belongs there ; that, whether the heart wants it or not, 
it and the heart are mates, made for one another, and 
so tending towards each other by a certain essential 
gravitation, whatever accidental causes may have tried 
to produce an estrangement between them. Take one 
such indication only, a very striking one, I think. 
There is in man a certain power of veneration, of awe, 
of adoration. This has always showed itself. In all 
sorts of men, in all sorts of places, it has broken out ; and 
men have tried to adapt it to all sorts of objects, to 
satisfy it with all sorts of food. The idolater has offered 
to his faculty of reverence his wooden idol, and said 
" There, worship that ; " the philosopher has offered it 
his abstract truth, and said "Venerate that;" the phil- 
anthropist has offered it his ideal humanity, and said 
" Worship that ; " and one result has always followed. 
Everywhere where nothing higher than the idol, the 
theory, or the humanity was offered for the reverence 
to fasten on, everywhere where it was offered no 
one supreme causal God, not merely the object of rever- 
ence has ceased to be reverenced, but the very power 
of reverence itself has been dissipated and lost; and 
idolatry, philosophy, philanthropy alike have grown 



102 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

irreverent, and man has lost and often come to despise 
that faculty of venerating and submissive awe, the awe 
of love, for which he found no use. If this be true, 
that there is a faculty in man which dies out on any 
other food, and thrives only on the personal Deity, then 
have we not exactly what I tried to describe, a need of 
which one may be utterly unconscious, and yet which 
is no less a need, crying, though the man does not hear 
it, for supply ? 

This is precisely the ground which I would take with 
any thoughtful man who told me seriously and without 
flippancy that he felt no want of God, that he felt no 
lack in the absence of relations between his life and 
that of a supreme infinite Father. " Yes," I would say, 
^' but there is in you a power of loving awe which needs 
infinite perfection and mercy to call it out and satisfy 
it. There is an affection which you cannot exercise 
towards any imperfect being. It is that mixture of ad- 
miration and reverence and fear and love, which we 
call worship. Now ask yourself. Are you not losing the 
power of worship ? Is it not dying for want of an ob- 
ject ? Are you not conscious that a power of the soul, 
'^'hich other men use, which you used once perhaps, is 
going from you ? Are you not substituting critical, 
carefully limited, philosophical, partial approbations of 
imperfect men and things, for that absolute, unhindered, 
whole-souled outpouring of worship which nothing but 
the perfect can demand or justify ? If this power is not 
utterly to die within you, do you not need God ? If 
you are not to lose that highest reach of love and fear 
where, uniting, they make worship, must you not have 
God ? Lo ! before this expiring faculty the personal 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 103 

God comes and stands, and it lifts up its dying hands 
to reach after Him ; it opens its dying eyes to look upon 
Him ; as when a man is perishing of starvation, the sight 
of bread summons him back to life. He need not die, 
but live, for here is his own life-food come to him.'' 

Woe to the man who loses the faculty of worship, 
the faculty of honoring and loving and fearing not 
merely something better than himself, but something 
which is the absolute best, the perfect good, — his God ! 
The life is gone out of his life when this is gone. There 
is a cloud upon his thought, a palsy on his action, a chill 
upon his love. Because you must w^orship, therefore 
you must have God. 

2. But more than this. Every man needs not merely 
a God to worship, but also, taking the fact which 
meets us everywhere of an estrangement by sin between 
mankind and God, every man needs some power to 
turn him and bring him back ; some reconciliation, some 
Eeconciler, some Savior for his soul. Again I say he 
may not know his need, but none the less the need is 
there. But, if a man has reached the first want and 
really is desiring God, then I think he generally does 
know, or in some vague way suspect, this second want, 
and does desire reconciliation. It is so natural ! Two of 
you, who have been friends, have quarrelled. Your very 
quarrel, it may be, has brought out to each of you how 
much you need each other. You never knew your friend 
was so necessary to your comfort and your happiness. 
You cannot do without him. Then at once, '' How shall 
I get to him ? " becomes your question. the awkward- 
ness and difficulty, the stumbling and shuffling and 
blundering of such efforts at return. Men are afraid 



104 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

and ashamed to try. They do not know how they will 
be received. They cannot give up their old pride. 
Eebellious tempers and bad habits block the way. I 
doubt not, so frequent are they, that there are people 
here to-night who are stumbling about in some such 
bog of unsettled quarrel, longing to get back to some 
friend whom they value more in their disagreement 
than even in the old days of unbroken peace. Their 
whole soul is hungering for reconciliation. The misery 
of their separation is that each at heart desires what 
neither has the frankness and the courage to attain. / 

Now under all outward rebellion and wickedness, 
there is in every man who ought to be a friend of God, 
and that means every man whom God has made, a 
need of reconciliation. To get back to God, that is 
the struggle. The soul is Godlike and seeks its own. 
It wants its Father. There is an orphanage, a home- 
sickness of the heart which has gone up into the ear of 
God, and called the Savior, the Eeconciler, to meet it by 
His wondrous life and death. I, for my part, love to 
see in every restlessness of man's moral life everywhere, 
whatever forms it takes, the struggles of this imprisoned 
desire. The reason may be rebellious, and vehemently 
cast aside the whole story of the ISTew Testament, but 
the soul is never w^hoUy at its rest away from God. 
Does this not put it most impressively before us ? Is 
it not something at least to startle us and make us 
think, if we come to know that the very God of heaven 
saw a w^ant, a struggle, a longing of our souls after 
Himself, w^hich was too deep, too obscure, too clouded 
over with other interests for even us to see ourselves, 
and came to meet that want w^ith the wonderful mani- 



THE MA.N OF MACEDONIA. 105 

festation of the incarnation, the atonement ? We hear 
of the marvellous power of the Gospel, and we come to 
doubt it when w^e see the multitudes of unsaved men. 
But it is true. The Gospel is pow^erful, omnipotent. A 
truth like this, thoroughly believed, and taken in, must 
melt the hardest heart and break down the most stub- 
born will. It does not save men, simply because it is 
not taken in, not believed. The Gospel is powerless, 
just as the medicine that you keep corked in its vial on 
the shelf is powerless. If you w^ill not take it, w^hat 
matters it what marvellous drugs have lent their subtle 
virtues to it ? Believe and thou art saved. Understand 
and know, and thoroughly take home into your affec- 
tion and your will, the certain truth that Christ saw 
your need of Him when you did not know^ it yourself, 
and came to help you at a cost past all calculation, — 
really believe this and you must be a new man and be 
saved. 

3. I should like to point out another" of the needs 
of man which God has heard appealing to Him and has 
satisfied completely. I know that I must speak about it 
very briefly. It is the need of spiritual guidance ; and it 
is a need whose utterance not God's ear alone can hear. 
Every man hears it in the race at large, and hears it 
in his brethren, how^ever deaf he may be to it in himself. 
I think there never was a materialist so complete that 
he did not realize that the great mass of men were not 
materialists, but believed in spiritual forces and longed 
for spiritual companies. He might think the spiritual 
tendency the wildest of delusions, but he could not 
doubt its prevalence. How could he ? Here is the 
w^hole earth full of it. Language is all shaped upon it. 



106 - THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

Thought is all saturated with it. In the most imposing 
and the most vulgar methods, by solemn oracles and 
rocking tables, men have been always trying to put 
themselves into communication with the spiritual world 
and to get counsel and help from within the vail. And 
if we hear the cry from one another, how much more 
God hears it. ' Do you think, poor stumbler, that God 
did not know it when you found no man to tell you 
what you ought to'do in a perplexity which, as it rose 
around you, seemed, as it was, unlike any bewilderment 
that had ever puzzled any man before ? Do you think, 
poor sufferer, that God did not hear it when in your 
sickness and pain men came about you with their kind- 
ness, fed you with delicacies, and spread soft cushions 
under the tortured body, and all the time the mind dis- 
eased, feeling so bitterly that these tender cares for the 
body's comfort did not begin to touch its spiritual pain, 
lay moaning and wailing out its hopeless woe ? Do 
you think now, my brother, when you have got a hard 
duty to do, a hard temptation to resist ; when you have 
felt all about you for strength, called in prudence and 
custom and respectability and interest to keep you 
straight, and found them all fail because, by their very 
nature, they have no spiritual strength to give ; when 
now you stand just ready to give way and fall, ready to 
go to-morrow morning and do the wrong thing that you 
have struggled against so long, — do you think that God 
does not know it all, and does not hear the poor fright- 
ened soul's cry for help against the outrage that is 
threatening her, and has not prepared a way of aid ? 
The power of the Holy Spirit ! — an everlasting spiritual 
presence among men. What but that is the thing we 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 107 

want ? That is what the old oracles were dreaming of, 
what the modern spiritualists to-night are fumbling 
after. The power of the Holy Ghost by which every 
man who is in doubt may know what is right, every 
man whose soul is sick may be made spiritually whole, 
every weak man may be made a strong man, — that 
is God's one sufficient answer to the endless appeal of 
man's spiritual life ; that is God's one great response 
to the unconscious need of spiritual guidance, which he 
hears crying out of the deep heart of every man. j 

I hope that I have made clear to you what I mean. 
I would that we might understand ourselves, see what w^e 
might be ; nay, see what we are. "While you are living 
a worldly and a wicked life, letting all sacred things go, 
caring for no duty, serving no God, there is another 
self, your possibility, the thing that you might be, 
the thing that God gave you a chance to be ; and that 
self, wronged and trampled on by your recklessness, 
escapes and flies to God with its appeal : — "0, come 
and help me. I am dying. I am dying. Give me 
Thyself for Father. Give me Thy Son for Savior. 
Give me Thy Spirit for my guide." So your soul pleads 
before God ; pleads with a pathos all the more piteous 
in his ears, because you do not hear the plea yourself; 
pleads with such sacred prevalence that the great 
m.erciful Heart yields and gives all that the dumb appeal 
has asked. 

What does it mean ? Here is the Gospel in its ful- 
ness. Here is God for you to worship. Here is Christ 
to save you. Here is the Comforter. Have you asked 
for them, my poor careless brother, that here they stand 



108 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 

with such profusion of blessing, waiting to help you ? 
'' Ah, no/' you say, " I never asked." Suppose, when 
Paul landed in Macedonia, he had turned to the careless 
group who watched him as he stepped ashore, and said, 
" Here am I ; you sent for me. Here am I with the 
truth, the Christ you need," — what must their answer 
have been ? " 0, no, you are mistaken ; we never sent ; 
we do not know you; we do not want you!" Yet 
they had sent. Their needs had stood and begged him 
to come over, out of the lips of that mysterious man of 
Macedonia. And when they came to know this, they 
must have found all the more precious the preciousness 
of a gospel which had come to them in answer to a need 
they did not know themselves. 

And so your needs have stood, they are standing now 
before God. They have moved Him to deep pity and 
care for you. And He has sent the supply for them be- 
fore you knew you wanted it. And here it is, — a God 
to worship, a Savior to believe in, a Comforter to rest 
upon. O, if you ever do come, as I would to God that 
you might come to-night, to take this mercy, and let 
your thirsty soul drink of this water of life ! then you 
will feel most deeply the goodness which provided for 
you before you even knew that you needed any such 
provision ; then you will understand those words of 
Paul : " God commendeth His love toward us, in that 
while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." 

Till that time comes, what can God do but stand and 
call you and warn you and beg you to know yourself. 
"Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with 
goods, and have need of nothing, and knowest not that 
thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind 



THE MAN OF MACEDONIA. 109 

and naked, I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in 
the fire, that thou may est be rich. Behold, I stand at 
the door and knock. If any man hear My voice, and 
open the door, I will come in and sup with him, and he 
with Me." 



VII. 

THE SYMMETEY OF LIFE. 

**Tlie Length and the Breadth and the Height of it are equal.'* — 
Rev. xxi. 16. 

St. John in his great vision sees the mystic city, 
" the holy Jerusalem/' descending out of heaven from 
God. It is the picture of glorified humanity, of human- 
ity as it shall be when it is brought to its completeness 
by being thoroughly filled with God. And one of the 
glories of the city which he saw was its symmetry. 
Our cities, our developments and presentations of 
human life, are partial and one-sided. This city out of 
heaven was symmetrical. In all its three dimensions it 
was complete. Neither was sacrificed to the other. 
" The length and the breadth and the height of it are 
equal.'' 

No man can say what mysteries of the yet unopened 
future are hidden in the picture of the mystic city ; 
but if that city represents, as I have said, the glorified 
humanity, then there is much of it that we can under- 
stand already. It declares that the perfect life of man 
will be perfect on every side. One token of its perfect- 
ness wiU be its symmetry. In each of its three dimen- 
sions it will be complete. 

So much of the noblest life which the world has seen 
dissatisfies us with its partialness ; so many of the 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. Ill 

greatest men we see are great only ui3on certain sides, 
and have their other sides all shrunken, flat, and small, 
that it may be well for us to dwell upon the picture, 
which these words suggest, of a humanity rich and full 
and strong all round, complete on every side, the 
perfect cube of human life which comes down out of 
heaven from God. 

As I speak I should like to keep before my mind 
and before yours, that picture which I think is the 
most interesting that the world has to show, the picture 
of a young man, brave and strong and generous, just 
starting out into life, and meaning with all his might to 
be the very best and most perfect man he can ; meaning 
-to make life the fullest and most genuine success. Let 
us see him before us as I speak. We shall see how 
natural his dangers and temptations are ; we shall see 
how his very strength tends to partialness ; we shall see 
how every power that is in him will grow doubly strong 
if he can buttress and steady it with strength upon the 
other sides, if in his growing character he can attain the 
symmetry and completeness of the new Jerusalem. 

There are, then, three directions or dimensions of 
human life to which we may fitly give these three 
names, Length and Breadth and Height. The Length of 
a life, in this meaning of it, is, of course, not its dura- 
tion. It is rather the reaching on and out of a man, in 
the line of activity and thought and self-development, 
which is indicated and prophesied by the character 
which is natural within him, by the special ambi- 
tions w^hich spring up out of his special powders. It is 
the push of a life forward to its own personal ends and 
ambitions. The Breadth of a life, on the other hand, is 



112 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

its outreach laterally, if we may say so. It is the 
constantly diffusive tendency which is always drawing 
a man outward into sympathy with other men. And 
the Height of a life is its reach upward towards God ; its 
sense of childhood ; its consciousness of the Divine Life 
over it with which it tries to live in love, communion, 
and obedience. These are the three dimensions of a 
life, — its length and breadth and height, — without the 
due development of all of which no life becomes 
complete. 

Think first about the Length of life in this understand- 
ing of the word. Here is a man who, as he comes to 
self-consciousness, recognizes in himself a certain nature. 
He cannot be mistaken. Other men have their special 
powers and dispositions. As this young man studies 
himself he finds that he has his. That nature which he 
has discovered in himself decides for him his career. 
He says to himself " Whatever I am to do in the world 
must be done in this direction." It is a fascinating 
discovery. It is an ever-memorable time for a man 
when he first makes it. It is almost as if a star woke 
to some subtle knowledge of itself, and felt within its 
shining frame the forces which decided what its orbit 
was to be. Because it is the star it is, that track 
through space must be its track. Out on that track 
it looks ; along that line which sweeps through the 
great host of stars it sends out all its hopes ; and 
all the rest of space is merely the field through which 
that track is flung ; all the great host of stars is but the 
audience which wait to hear it as it goes singing on its 
way. So starts the young life which • has come to self- 
discovery and found out what it is to do by finding out 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 113 

what it is. It starts to do that destined thing ; to run 
out that appointed course. Nay, the man when he arrives 
at this self-discovery finds that his nature has not waited 
for him to recognize himself. What he is, even before 
he knows it, has decided what he does. It may be 
late in life before he learns to say of himself " This is 
what I am." But then he looks back and discerns that, 
even without his knowing himself enough to have 
found it out, his life has run out in a line which had 
the promise and potency of its direction in the nature 
which his birth and education gave him. But if he 
does know it, the course is yet more definite and clear. 
Every act that he does is a new section of that line 
which runs between his nature and his appointed work. 
Just in proportion to the definiteness with which he has 
measured and understood himself, is the sharpness of 
that line which every thought and act and word is pro- 
jecting a little farther, through the host of human lives, 
towards the purpose of his , living,- towards the thing 
which he believes that he is set into the world to do. 

Your own experience will tell you what I mean. 
"Have you known any young man who early found out 
what his nature was ; found out, for instance, that he 
had a legal mind and character ? He said to himself " I 
am made to be a lawyer.'' Instantly wdth that dis- 
covery it was as if two points stood out clearly to him ; 
he with his legal nature here ; the full, completed law- 
yer's work and fame afar off there. Two unconnected 
points they seemed at first, which simply beckoned to 
each other across the great distance, and knew that, 
however unconnected they might be, they had to do 
with one another and must ultimately meet. Then 

8 



114 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

that man's life became one long extension of his nature 
and his powers and his will along a line which should 
at last attain that distant goal. All his self-culture 
strove that way. He read no book, he sought no 
friend, he gave himself no recreation, which was not 
somehow going to help him to his end and make him a 
better lawyer. Through the confusion and whirl of 
human lives, his life ran in one sharp, narrow line, 
almost as straight and clear as the railroad track across 
a continent, from what he knew he was, to what he 
meant to be and do. As the railroad track sweeps 
through the towns which string themselves along it, 
climbs mountains and plunges into valleys, hides itself 
in forests and flashes out again into broad plains and 
along the sunny sides of happy lakes, and evidently 
cares nothing for them all except as they just give it 
ground on which to roll out its length towards its end 
by the shore of the Pacific, — so this man's life pierces 
right on through all the tempting and perplexing com- 
plications of our human living, and will not rest until 
it has attained the mastery of legal power. That clear, 
str^ght line of its unswerving intention, that struggier 
and push right onward to the end, — that is the length 
of this man's life. 

And if you recognize this, as of course you do, then 
you know also how necessary an element or dimension 
of any useful and successful life this is. To have an 
end and seek it eagerly, no man does anything in the 
world without that. If we let our thoughts leap at once 
to the summit of human living, and think of Jesus, we 
see it in perfection. The onward reach, the struggle to 
an apprehended purpose, the straight clear line right 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 115 

from His own self-knowledge to His work, was perfect 
in the Lord. "For this cause was I born/' He cried. 
His life pierced like an arrow through the cloud of aim- 
less lives, never for a moment losing its direction, 
hurrying on with a haste and assurance w^hich were 
divine. And this which He illustrates perfectly is, in 
our own fashion, one of the favorite thoughts of our own 
time. No man finds less tolerance to-day than the aim- 
less man, the man whose life lies and swings like a 
pool, instead of flowing straight onward like a river. 
We revel in the making of specialists. Often it seems 
as if the more narrow and straight we could make the 
line which runs between the nature and its work, the 
more beautiful we thought it. We make our boys 
clioose their electives when they go to college, decide 
at once on what they mean to do, and pour all the 
stream of knowledge down the sluiceway which leads 
to that one wheel. Perhaps we overdo it, but no 
thinking man dreams of saying that the thing itself is 
wrong. This movement of a man's whole life along 
some clearly apprehended line of self-development and 
self-accomplishment, this reaching of a life out forw^ard 
to its own best attainment, no man can live as a man 
ought to live without it. The men who have no pur- 
pose, the men in whose life this first dimension of 
length is wanting or is very weak, are good for nothing. 
They lie in the world like mere pulpy masses, giving it 
no strength or interest or character. 

Set yourself earnestly to see what you were made to 
do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it. That is 
the first thing that we want to say to our young man 
in the building of whose life we feel an interest. As 



116 THE SYMMETKY OF LIFE. 

we say it we feel almost a hesitation, it may be, because 
the exhortation sounds so selfish. Self-study and self- 
culture, surely that makes a very selfish life. Indeed it 
does. But he has thought very little who has not dis- 
covered two things concerning selfislmess. First, that 
there is a lofty selfishness, a high care for our own 
culture, which is a duty, and not a fault. And secondly, 
that he who in this highest way cares for himself and 
seeks for himself his own best good, must, whether he 
thinks of doing it or not, help other men's development 
as well as his own. It is only the line which is seeking 
something that is low, that can pierce through the live 
mass of men's lives and interests and be as wholly inde- 
pendent of them all as I pictured just now. Even the 
railroad track, hurrying to the Pacific, must leave some- 
thing of civilizing influence on the prairies which it 
crosses. In the highest and purest sense of the word 
there certainly was selfishness in Jesus. No man 
might tempt or force Him from the resolute determina- 
tion to unfold His appointed life and be His perfect 
self. The world is right when it follows its blind in- 
stinct and stands, with some kind of gratitude though 
not a gratitude of the most loving sort, beside the grave 
of some man who in life has been loftily possessed with 
the passion for self-culture, and has never thought of 
benefiting the world ; for if his passion for self- culture 
has really been of the most lofty kind, the world must 
be the better for it. 

Therefore we may freely say to any young man, Find 
your purpose and fling your life out to it ; and the loftier 
your purpose is, the more sure you will be to make the 
world richer with every enrichment of yourself. And 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

this, you see, comes to the same thing as saj/. 
this first dimension of life, which we call Lengt. 
more loftily it is sought, has always a tendency to p. 
duce the second dimension of life, which we called 
Breadth. Of that second dimension let us go on now to 
speak. I have ventured to call this quality of breadth 
in a man's life its outreach laterally. When that ten- 
dency of which I have just been talking, the tendency 
of a man's career, the more loftily it is pursued, to bring 
him into sympathy and relationship with other men, 
— when that tendency, I say, is consciously and delib- 
erately acknowledged, and a man comes to value his 
owm personal career because of the way in which it re- 
lates him to his brethren and the help which it permits 
him to offer them, then his life has distinctly begun to 
open in this new direction, and to its length it has added 
breadth. There are men enough with whom no such 
opening seems to take place. You know them well ; 
men eager, earnest, and intense, reaching forward toward 
their prize, living straight onward in their. clearly appre- 
hended line of life ; but to all appearance, so far as you 
and I can see, living exactly as they would live if they 
were the only living beings on the surface of the earth, 
or as if all the other beings wdth whom they came 
in contact were only like the wooden rounds upon the 
ladder by which they climbed to their own personal 
ambition. Such men you have all known ; men who 
could not conceive of any other life as valuable, happy, 
or respectable, except their own ; men " wrapped up in 
themselves," as we say, — an envelope as thick as leather, 
through which no pressure of any other life or character 
could reach them. And the one feeling that you have 



118 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

about such perfect specialists is the wonder that so great 
intelligence can be compressed into such narrowness. 
They are as^ bright and sliarp as needles, and as hard 
and narrow. 

But when a man has length and breadth of life to- 
gether, we feel at once how the two help each other. 
Lenc^th without breadth is hard and narrow. Breadth 
without length, — sympathy with others in a man who has 
no intense and clear direction for himself, — is soft and 
weak. You see this in the instinctive and strong dis- 
like which all men have for the professional reformer 
and philanthropist. Tlie world dislikes a man who, 
with no definite occupation of his own, not trying to be 
anything particular liimself, devotes himself to telling 
other people what they ought to be. It may allow his 
good intentions, but it will not feel his influence. The 
man whom the world delights to feel is the man who 
has evidently conceived some strong and distinct pur- 
pose for himself, from which he will allow nothing to 
turn his feet aside, who means to be something with all 
his soul ; and yet who finds, in his own earnest effort to 
fill out liis own career, the interpretation of the careers 
of other men ; and also finds, in sympathy witli otlier 
men, tlie transfiguration and sustainment of his own 
appointed struggle. 

Indeed these are the two ways in which the relation 
between the length and breadth of a man's life, between 
his energy in his own career and liis sympatliy with tlie 
careers of other men, comes out and shows itself. First, 
the man's own career becomes to him the interpretation 
of the careers of other men ; and secondly, by his sym- 
pathy with other men, his own life displays to him its 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 119 

best capacity. The first of these is very beautiful to 
watch. Imagine the reformer, whom I spoke of, sud- 
denly called to forget the work of helping other men, 
and to plunge into some work of his own. With what 
surprise at his own increase of wisdom he would come 
back, by and by, to the help of his brethren ! What far 
wiser and more reverent hands he would lay upon their 
lives ; with what tones of deepened understanding he 
would speak to their needs and sins and temptations, 
after he had himself tried to live a true life of his own ! 
This is the reason, I suppose, why, in the Bible, the 
ministry of angels to mankind, while it is clearly in- 
timated, is made so little of. It is because, however 
real it is, it could not be brought very close to the 
intelligence and gratitude of men, so long as the personal 
lives of the angels are hidden in mystery. Only he 
who lives a life of his own can help the lives of other 
men. Surely there is here one of the simplest and 
strongest views which a man possibly can take of his 
own life. " Let me live," he may say, " as fully as I 
can, in order that in this life of mine I may learn what 
life really is, and so be fit to understand and help the 
lives of men about me. Let me make my own career 
as vivid and successful as possible, that in it I may get 
at the secret of life, which, when I have once found it, 
will surely be the key to other lives besides my own." 
He who should talk and think so of his own career 
would evidently have gone far towards solving the 
problem of the apparent incompatibility between intense 
devotion to one's own pursuit and cordial sympathy 
with other men. He would find, in the very heart of 
his own work, the clew to the works of other men. He 



120 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

would be no mere specialist, and yet lie would toil 
hardest of all men in the special task in which he was 
engaged. But his task would be always glorified and 
kept from narrowness by his perpetual demand upon it, 
that it should give him such a broad understanding of 
human life in general as should make him fit to read 
and touch and help all other kinds of life. 

And if thus the special life does much to make the 
sympathy with other lives intelligent and strong, the 
debt is yet not wholly on one side. There is a wonder- 
ful power in sympathy to open and display the hidden 
richness of a man's own seemingly narrow life. You 
think that God has been training you in one sort of dis- 
cijjline, but v/hen you let yourself go out in sympathy 
with other men whose disciplines have been completely 
different from your own, jo\x find that in your discipline 
the power of theirs was liidden. This is the power 
which sympathy has to multiply life and make out of 
one experience the substance and value of a hundred. 
The well man sympathizes with the sick man, and 
thereby exchanges, as it were, some of the superfluous 
riches of his health into the other coin of sickness, gets 
something of the culture which would have come to him 
if he had himself been sick. The sick man, in return, 
gets something, even in all his pain and weakness, of 
the discipline of health and strength. The same is true 
about the sympathy of the rich with the poor, of the 
believer with the doubter, of the hopeful with the de- 
spondent, of the liberal with the bigoted ; a3^e, even of 
the saint with the sinner. The holiest soul, pitying the 
brother-soul which has fallen into vilest vice, gains, 
while it keeps its own purity unsoiled, something of the 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 121 

sight of that other side of God, the side where justice 
and forgiveness blend in the opal mystery of grace, 
AA'hich it would seem as if only the soul that looked up 
out of the depths of guilt could see. All this is perfect 
in the vicariousness of Christ ; and what w^as perfect 
there, is echoed imperfectly in the way in which every 
man's special life becomes enlarged and multiplied as 
he looks abroad from it in sympathy with other men. 

So much I say about the length and breadth of life. 
One other dimension still remains. The length and 
breadth and height of it are equal. The Height of life 
is its reach upward toward something distinctly greater 
than humanity. Evidently all that I have yet described, 
all the length and breadth of life, might exist, and 
yet man be a creature wholly of the earth. He might 
move on straight forward in his own career. He might 
even enter into living sympathy with his brother-men; 
and yet never look up, never seem to have anything to 
do with anything above this flat and level plain of hu- 
man life. A world without a sky ! How near any one 
man's life here and there may come to that, I dare not 
undertake to say. Some men will earnestly insist that 
that is just their life; that there is no divine appetite, 
no reaching Godward in them anyw^here. But to a man 
who thoroughly believes in God, I think that it will 
always seem that such a life^ however any man may 
think that he is living it, must always be impossible for 
every man. There cannot be a God and yet any one of 
His creatures live exactly and entirely as if there was 
no God. 

The reaching of mankind towards God ! Evidently, 
in order that that may become a true dimension of a 



122 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

man's life, it must not be a special action. It must be 
something which pervades all that he is and does. 
It must not be a solitary column set on one holy spot of 
the nature. It must be a movement of the whole na- 
ture upward. Here has been one of the great hin- 
derances of the power of religion in the world. Eeligion 
has been treated as if it were a special exercise of a 
special power, not as if it were the possible loftiness of 
everything that a man could think or be or do. The 
result has been that certain men and certain parts of 
men have stood forth as distinctively religious, and that 
the possible religiousness of all life has been but very 
imperfectly felt and acknowledged. This has made 
religion weak. Man's strongest powers, man's intensest 
passions, have been involved in the working out of his 
career, and in the development of his relations with his 
fellow-men. What has been left over for religion has 
been the weakest part of him, his sentiments and fears ; 
and so religion, very often, has come to seem a thing of 
mystic moods and frightened superstitions. This pict- 
ure from the city of the Revelation seems to me to make 
the matter very clear. The height of life, its reach to- 
ward God, must be coextensive with, must be part of 
the one same symmetrical whole with, the length of life 
or its reach towards its personal ambition, and the 
breadth of life or its reach towards the sympathy of 
brother-lives. It is when a man begins to know the 
ambition of his life not simply as the choice of his own 
will but as the wise assignment of God's love ; and to 
know his relations to his brethren not simply as the 
result of his own impulsive affections but as the seek- 
ing of his soul for these souls because they all belong 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. . 123 

to the great Father-soul; it is then that life for that 
man begins to lift itself all over and to grow towards 
completion upward through all its length and breadth. 
That is a noble time, a bewildering and exalting time in 
any of our lives, when into everything that we are doing 
enters the spirit of God, and thenceforth moving ever 
up toward the God to whom it belongs, that Spirit, 
dwelling in our life, carries our life up with it ; not 
separating our life from the earth, but making every 
part of it while it still keeps its hold on earth, soar up 
and have to do with heaven ; so completing life in its 
height, by making it divine. 

To any man in whom that uplifting of life has 
genuinely begun, all life without it must seem very flat 
and poor. My dear friends, this is Advent Sunday. 
Once more wrought into all our service, pressed into all 
our hearts, has come to-day the rich, wonderful truth 
that God once came into our world. And that one 
coming of God we know gets its great value from being 
the type and promise of the truth that God is always 
coming. And for God to come into the world means 
for Him to come into our lives. On Advent Sunday, 
then, let us get close hold of this truth. These lives of 
ours, hurrying on in their ambitions, spreading out in 
their loves, they are capable of being filled with God, 
possessed by His love, eager after His communion ; and, 
if they can be, if they are, then, without losing their 
eager pursuit of their appointed task, without losing their 
cordial reaching after the lives around them, they shall 
be quietly, steadily, nobly lifted into something of the 
peace and dignity of the God whom they aspire to. 
The fret and restlessness shall fade out of their ambi- 



124 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

' tions ; the jealousy shall disappear out of their loves. 
Love for themselves and love for their brethren, robed and 
enfolded into the love for God, shall be purified and 
cleared of all meanness, shall be filled with a strength 
as calm as it is strong. 0, my dear friends, there is 
room for that new dimension over the lives that all of 
you are living. Above the head of the most earthly 
of you heaven is open. You may aspire into it and 
complete yourself upward if you will. All that you are 
now imperfectly, as an energetic, sympathetic man, you 
may be perfectly as the child of God, knowing your 
Father and living in consecrated obedience to Him. 

These are the three dimensions then of a full human 
life, its length, its breadth, its height. The life which 
has only length, only intensity of ambition, is narrow. 
The life that has length and breadth, intense ambition 
and broad humanity, is thin. It is like a great, flat 
plain, of which one wearies, and which sooner or later 
wearies of itself. The life which to its length and 
breadth adds height, which to its personal ambition and 
sympathy with man, adds the love and obedience of 
God, completes itself into the cube of the eternal city 
and is the life complete. 

Think for a moment of the life of the great apostle, 
the manly, many-sided Paul. " I press toward the 
mark for the prize of my high calling ; " he writes to 
the Philippians. That is the length of life for him. 
" I will gladly spend and be spent for you ; " he writes 
to the Corinthians. There is the breadth of life for 
him. " God hath raised us up and made us sit to- 
gether in heavenly places in Christ Jesus ; " he writes 



THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 125 

to the Ephesians. There is the height of life for him. 
You can add nothing to these three dimensions when 
you try to account to yourself for the impression of 
completeness which comes to you out of his simple, 
lofty story. 

We need not stop with him. Look at the Lord 
of Paul. See how in Christ the same symmetrical 
manhood shines yet more complete. See what intense 
ambition to complete His work, what tender sympathy 
with every struggling brother by His side, and at the 
same time what a perpetual dependence on His Father 
is in Him. '' For this cause came I into the world." 
" For their sakes I sanctify myself." '' Now, Father, 
glorify Thou me." Leave either of those out and you 
have not the perfect Christ, not the entire symmetry of 
manhood. 

If we try to gather into shape some picture of what 
the perfect man of heaven is to be, still we must keep 
the symmetry of these his three dimensions. It must 
be that forever before each glorified spirit in the other 
life there shall be set one goal of peculiar ambition, his 
goal, after which he is peculiarly to strive, the struggle 
after which is to make his eternal life to be forever 
different from every other among all the hosts of 
heaven. And yet it must be that as each soul strives 
towards his own attainment he shall be knit forever 
into closer and closer union with all the other countless 
souls which are striving after theirs. And the inspiring 
power of it all, the source of all the energy and all the 
love, must then be clear beyond all doubt ; the ceaseless 
flood of light forever pouring forth from the self-living 
God to fill and feed the open lives of His redeemed who 



126 THE SYMMETRY OF LIFE. 

live by Him. There is the symmetry of manhood 
perfect. There, in redeemed and glorified human nature, 
is the true heavenly Jerusalem, 

I hope that we are all striving and praying now that 
we may come to some such symmetrical completeness. 
Tliis is the glory of a young man's life. Do not dare to 
live without some clear intention toward which your 
living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all 
your might. Do not add act to act and day to day in 
perfect thoughtlessness, never asking yourself whither 
the growing line is leading.. But at the same time do 
not dare to be so absorbed in your own life, so wrapped 
up in listening to the sound of your own hurrying 
wheels, that all this vast pathetic music, made up of the 
mingled joy and sorrow of your fellow-men, shall not 
find out your heart and claim it and make you rejoice 
to give yourself for them. And yet, all the while, keep 
the upward windows open. Do not dare to think that 
a child of God can worthily work out his career or 
worthily serve God's other children unless he does both 
in the love and fear of God their Father. Be sure that 
ambition and charity will both grow mean unless they 
are both inspired and exalted by religion. Energy, 
love, and faith, those make the perfect man. And 
Christ, who is the perfectness of all of them, gives them 
all three to any young man who, at the very outset of 
his life, gives up himself to Him. If this morning there 
is any young man here who generously wants to live a 
whole life, wants to complete himself on every side, to 
him Christ, the Lord, stands ready to give these three, 
energy, love, and faith, and to train them in him all 
together, till they make in him the perfect man. 



VIII. 

HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

" And Jesus said unto them, How many loaves have ye ? " — 
Matt. xv. 34. 

It was one of the miracles of Jesus in which His 
nature was seen most interestingly. A multitude of 
people had followed him into the country, anxious to 
hear Him preach, some of them also needing and 
expecting that He would cure their sicknesses. They 
had lingered with Him for three days, not finding it in 
their hearts to leave Him and return, until their food 
was all exhausted and they were in wretched plight. 
Then Jesus declared His pity for them and consulted 
with His disciples. '' I have compassion on the multi- 
tude," He said, " because they continue with Me now 
three days and have nothing to eat, and I will not send 
them away fasting lest they faint in the way." And 
His disciples reminded Him how impossible it was to 
buy any food off in the desert where they were ; and 
then Jesus, intending to relieve the people's wants by 
extraordinary power, turned to His disciples and asked 
them how many loaves of bread they had. They told 
Him seven, and a few little fishes. And He took the 
little which they had and blessed it, and it became under 
His blessing abundant for the supply of all the crowd. 

Such is the story. The need of the great, hungry 



128 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

host before Him touches the Lord and makes Him use 
His power to relieve them. But what is striking in the 
narrative is this, that when Jesus is moved by their 
suffering, He is moved in all His nature. Every part 
of Him is stirred. Not merely His emotions and His 
impulses, so that He is eager to relieve at once the 
wretchedness which looks up to Him out of their famished 
eyes, but His wisdom is stirred. All the principles of 
His life start into action together, all His care and 
pity. His care and pity for the soul as well as for the 
body move at once. It is this completeness of His 
nature, the way in which it is all one, and works 
and lives as one, that makes Him often so very differ- 
ent from us. Our lives are disjointed. One part of us 
works at a time. It is hard for us to be brave and 
prudent together ; hard for us to be liberal and just at 
the same time. Our sympathy is excited, and we help 
a man often in a way that does more harm than good, 
because we help with only one hand, with only half 
our nature ; with our pity but not with our wisdom ; 
with care for his hunger but with no care for his self- 
respect and manliness. But when Christ helps a man 
His whole nature in complete balance moves upon that 
other life. He feels all its claims and needs in their 
just proportion. So He meets Nicodemus in the mid- 
night chamber, and the young man who comes to Him 
in the temple, and Thomas after the resurrection. 

Now in this miracle of Jesus which I have recalled 
to you there is a meeting of generosity and frugality 
which is striking and suggestive. These two things 
do meet indeed with us. We try to be generous and 
frugal at the same time, but the result in us is mean. 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 129 

We try to give and yet to save. We try to satisfy the 
instinct which makes us want to aid our brethren, and 
at the same time not to disappoint the instinct which 
makes us want to save and spare the things we have. 
But the result in us is mean. When Christ unites 
generosity and frugality the result in Him is noble. 
We feel His pity and care for the poor people a great deal 
more when we see Him take the wretched little stock 
of food which they possessed into His hands and make 
that the basis of His bounty, than if with an easy sweep 
of His hand He had bid the skies open and rain manna 
and quails once Inore upon the hungry host. His 
generosity is emphasized for us by its frugal methods, 
and His frugality is dignified by its generous purpose. 

But surely the act is a very striking one. Here was ' 
He who could do everything. What hindered Him 
from sweeping the loaves they had aside and, by a 
superb exercise of power, bidding the very desert where 
they stood burst into a wilderness of fruits, break its 
hard ground with orchard trees all grown and laden, 
with streams of sweet water running down between 
them. But no ! He brings out the poor remnant which 
was so little and so miserable that they had thought 
nothing of it. He has to ask for it. They do not oJffer 
it. He says " How many loaves have ye ? " and they 
seem to answer '' Here is this, but what is this good 
for ? " Then He takes that and multiplies it into all 
they need. It seems as if there were two principles 
here, so fundamental that the divine power of Jesus 
worked by them almost of necessity, so important that 
they must be made prominent even in all His impetuous 
eagerness to help those starving men. The first is the 

9 



130 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

principle of continuity, that what is to be must come 
out of what has been, that new things must come to be 
by an enlargement, a development, a change and growth 
of old things ; and the second is the principle of econ- 
omy, that nothing however little or poor is to be wasted. 
They are two simple principles. I want to trace with 
you to-day the way in which they run through many 
departments of life. But notice, first, how clearly they 
stand out here in the miracle. 
^ There are two ideas which belong to the notion of 
vast power in our crude conceptions of it. One is 
spasmodicalness and the other is waste. It is strange 
how both of these ideas appear in all men's first con- 
ceptions of the supernatural and of omnipotence. The 
first notions of a Deity are of One who is above all law 
and order and economy. Let the poor be niggardly, a 
slave to rules, counting over his little stock, squeezing 
every penny that he pays ; but let the AU-Powerful be 
open-handed, counting as nothing what other beings 
must save, originating life whenever life is needed, full 
of an easy spontaneity, flinging the miracles of creation 
everywhere. But it is striking to see how as men go 
on and learn more of God, these ideas which were at 
first cast almost indignantly out of their conception of 
Him, gradually come back and are set in the place of 
highest honor. It is God's highest glory that He is a 
God of law. Continuousness is the crown of His gov- 
ernment. That He brings every future out of some 
past is the charm of all His government. That He 
lets nothing go to waste is the highest perfection of 
His boundless resource. This is the highest knowledge 
of God. Continuity and economy are His solemn foot- 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 131 

prints by which we trace His presence in our world. The 
need of evolution, the necessity that everything which 
is to be should come out of something which has been 
before, and the abhorrence of waste, — continuity and 
economy, — these are the proof-marks of Divinity. 

Let us remember, first, how these two principles are 
stamped on all the operations of nature. AVe are all 
learning more and more, to some people's dismay, to 
other people's joy and inspiration, how nature loves to 
develop, how rare the acts of real creation are. The 
farmer goes and stands among rich western fields, and 
they cry out to him, '' Give us seed and we will give 
you back a harvest that shall bewilder you with its 
immensity. There is no end to what we can do if you 
give us seed, but without seed we can do nothing." 
You go to Nature and say, " Feed me or I shall starve ; " 
and her question comes back to you, " How many loaves 
have you ? Give me something to begin with, however 
little it may be." Drop the old remnants of a past life 
into the ever fruitful soil, and all the possibilities of 
new life open. The spring-time finds last summer's 
roots still remaining in the ground, and quickens them 
to life again, and multiplies them into a richer summer 
still. Ingenious Nature finds a germ wherever it is 
dropped ; but without the germ she will do nothing. 
Mere spontaneity she disowns and disproves more and 
more. Think what a place the world would be to live 
in if this were not so, if nature were a wizard, fitful and 
whimsical, doing her wonders in no sequel or connection 
with each other, with her pets and favorites, instead of 
being, as she is, a mother with her great, wise, reason- 
able laws of the house which press alike on all her 



132 HOW, MANY LOAVES HAVE YE? 

children, which no one of the children thinks of seeing 
changed or violated. That is what makes the world 
such a good home for man to dwell in, his school- 
room and his home at once. If anywhere in all the 
world it were on certain record, past all doubt, that just 
one solitary field, hidden away in some remote valley, 
had burst into a harvest of corn without a seed of corn 
having been sown in it by design or accident, that one 
freak of spontaneousness must work great harm among 
mankind. Men enough there are w^ho would make that 
fact their one fact in natural science, and, disregarding 
the million fields which gave no harvest except in answer 
to seed, would go looking for the second field that was 
to give its crop for nothing ; as when one man has found 
a pot of gold, a hundred more forget that gold, by the 
world's great general law, is earned, not found, and so 
go digging where they have buried nothing, seeking a 
prize that is not there. It is the continuity of life, the 
continuity of nature, that is our salvation. " Nothing 
from nothing " is the first law of her household, and her 
dullest children must learn it, for it is written on the 
walls that shelter them, on the ground they tread, on 
the table from w^hich they eat, and on the tools with 
which they work. 

And her law of economy is just as clear. Profusion, 
but no w^aste ; this is the lesson that nature reads us 
everywhere. The dead leaves of this autumn are worked 
into next year's soil. The little stream that has w^atered 
the greenness of many meadow^s goes afterwards to do 
duty in the great sea. The vast surrounding atmosphere 
is. made efficient over and over again for the breath of 
living men. Everywhere profusion, but no waste. For 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 133 



men who need to be trained to reasonableness and care, 
God has built just the home they needed for their train- 
in c^, and sent us to live in this star which shines amonot 
His other stars steadily and soberly with its double 
light of continuity and economy. 

The same truth appears in the use which God makes 
of men in the world. One of the most interesting 
studies of history is to see how unspasmodic is the ap- 
pearance of great men. They are not accidents. Their 
lives are not isolated unaccountable meteors. However 
little it may be seen at the time of their lives, those who 
live after them, and look back over the ranges of history, 
can see that the heroes and great men are the culmina- 
tion and result of processes. The times in which they 
live, the smaller men who have gone before them, are 
necessary to make them what they come to be. If it 
were not so, such lives might be expected to start forth 
indiscrijninately everywhere, in all ages alike, in all 
stages and kinds of civilization. But barbarism is a flat 
level of monotony ; and certain artificial periods of cul- 
ture are barren of all greatness. The personal element 
in the hero must be recognized. No age or circum- 
stances can make a great man of a little one. But still 
all history bears witness that when God means to make 
a great man. He puts the circumstances of the world and 
the lives of lesser men under tribute. He does not fling 
His hero like an aerolite out of the sky. He bids him 
grow like an oak out of the earth. All earnest, pure, 
unselfish, faithful men who have lived their obscure 
lives well, have helped to make him. God has let none 
of them be wasted. A thousand unrecorded patriots 
helped to make Washington; a thousand lovers of 



134 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

liberty contributed to Lincoln. It is the continuity and 
economy of human life. The great feast grows out of 
the few loaves and fishes. And any man who in his 
small degree is living like the child of God, has a right 
to all the comfort of knowing that God will not let his 
life be lost, but will use it in the making of some great 
child of God, as he used centuries of Jewish lives, 
prophets, priests, patriots, kings, peasants, women, chil- 
dren, to make the human life of His Incarnate Son. 

The same is true of truths, as well as of men. All the 
history of the progress of men's thought bears witness 
that when God wants to give men knowledge which 
they have not had before. He always opens it to them 
out of something which they have already known. 
There is no such thing as the dropping of a great truth 
any more than of a great man, suddenly, ready-made, 
out of the sky. '' How is it with Eevelation ? How is 
it with Christianity ? " you say. There, more than any- 
wdiere, it certainly is true that God works continuously 
and economically. What does Judaism mean ? When 
God wanted to give the world the truth of Christ, He 
took that Hebrew nation w^hich had some truth, truth 
of the right sort, though it was very meagre and in- 
sufficient, and mixed up with other things which were 
not true ; He took that truth and brought Christianity 
out of that. And so when He has wanted to brino- His 
Christianity, His highest truth, into any new region, He 
has always made it appear as the fulfilment, the com- 
pletion, of what the people of that region knew already. 
Paul stands upon Mars' Hill at Athens, and w^ants to 
show those people Christ. How does he begin ? He 
takes what he finds there. He points to their altar to 



HOW MANY LOAA^ES HAVE YE ? 135 

the unknown god, and says, " Him whom ye ignorantly 
worship I declare to you." He opens the books of their 
own writers and finds there his text, " As . certain of 
your own poets have said." Out of their bit of truth he 
opens the rich completeness of the truth he has to tell. 
Is it not just exactly the miracle of Christ ? Paul comes 
and says to Athens, " How many loaves have you ? " 
and they say, " Seven, and a few little fishes. "We 
believe in God ; we believe in responsibility ; we believe 
in man's childhood to God ; we believe in worship." 
xlnd there, upon the Areopagus, Paul did what His 
Master did long before, by the Sea of Galilee ; '' He took 
the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and 
brake them and gave to the multitude ; and they did all 
eat and were filled." 

And so it always is. There is a doctrine which we 
hear from time to time, that it is not the amount of truth 
which a man knows, but his earnestness in holding 
what he does know ; not his opinions, but his sincerity 
in holding his opinions, which is of value. That seems 
to me after all to be probably only a clumsy way of 
getting hold of this idea, that God always brings new 
truth out of old truth, and so that whoever has any bit 
of truth and really holds it fast is within the possibility 
of all the truth that God can give to man. There is no 
spontaneous generation of truth. " To him that hath 
shall be given." It seems to me that there is a great 
deal of light here of just the sort which a great many 
people need now. Men look around them and they say 
that old systems of religious thought are changing. 
Certainly they are. They always have been changing. 
There never was a time when they stood still. There 



136 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

is no delusion about history more complete than to 
suppose that there has ever been a time when, from year 
to 5^ear and over a large body of mankind, religious 
ideas have been fixed and permanent and unanimously 
held. No man can put his finger upon such a period. 
They have always been changing as they are to-day. 
But this has been always true, that the new idea has 
always been born of the old, that when men have ad- 
vanced to higher truth it has been from the basis of the 
.truth which they have held already. It has been not 
by flinging their net out into the -heavens in hopes to 
catch a star, but by digging deeper into the substance 
of the earth on which they stood, and finding there a 
root. And that is what we have to look for in the 
future. You and I cling to the old historic statements 
of our faith. We hold fast by the old historic church 
as it appears to-day. Wliat is our feeling as we hold 
fast there ? Is it that the church to-day knows all the 
truth which man will ever know ? Is it that the relig- 
ious conceptions which prevail to-day will never change? 
A man must be deaf to the voices of the history behind 
him, blind to the signs of tiines around him, before he 
can think that. We stand expecting change and prog- 
ress, new truth, new light. But we stand here in the 
historic church, in the historic truth, because we believe 
that the new truth must come out of this old truth, the 
perfect truth out of this partial truth, some day. We 
keep close to the seven loaves because we believe that 
when the multitude is fed it will be with an abundance 
blessed by God out of this, which, however meagre, is 
still real. 

I would that men might understand that invitation 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 137 

from the Christian Church to-day. It is not as the 
present possessor of all truth that she invites men to 
her household. She must not claim that. Men will 
discover that her claim is false if she does. But it is as 
the possessor of truth out of which God will call, nay is 
forever calling new truth, that she summons men not 
merely to a present which she offers, but to a future in 
which she believes. The church is progressive by her 
very essence. The church is man occupied by Christ. 
And since Christ cannot at once occupy man completely, 
and cannot be satisfied until He has occupied man com- 
pletely, the church must make progress. If she ceases 
to advance she dies. Only in all her progress she be- 
lieves in the continuity and economy of God. She looks 
for the truth which she is to know to come out of the 
truth which she knows already ; and she is sure that no 
duty done or light attained in any m.ost obscure corner 
of her life is wasted, but helps to the perfect duty and 
the perfect light that are to be. That is why in her is 
the true home for the man who most hopes and prays 
for the progress of mankind. 

To every man who has advanced or who hopes that 
he may advance to higher, fuller, truer views of Chris- 
tian truth, I think that this lesson of the loaves has 
something very plain to say. I see a man who thinks 
differently to-day from the way in which he thought ten 
years ago. He knows more truth. He is sure that God 
has given him new knowledge. How shall that man 
look back to what he used to know, to his old creed ? 
Surely he may, with all rejoicing for the fuller light to 
which he has been brought, own the half-light in which 
he used to walk, and honor it. He may remember wdth 



138 HOW MANY LOAYES HAYE YE? 

reYerence how through some most imperfect conception 
of truth, which he could not possibly hold now, he came 
into the larger knowledge where he now finds his joy. 
Out of the notions which are dead now, he has drawn 
the life by which he Kycs. I think it is always a shame 
for a man to abuse any creed out of which he has passed 
into what he holds to be a truer creed. When he held 
that old creed he was either sincere or insincere. If he 
was insincere, let him abuse himself and not the creed 
which, whatcYcr was its power or its weakness, could do 
nothing for a man like him. If he was sincere, let him 
know that much of the good faith with which he holds 
his new dear truth comes from the training of that old 
dcYotion. No, if God has led you to see truth which 
once you did not see, and to reject as error what once 
you thought was true, do not try to signalize your new 
allegiance by defaming your old master. The man who 
thinks to make much of the fuller truth to which he has 
come, by upbraiding the partial truth through which he 
came to it, is a poor creature. If I met a Mohammedan 
who had turned Christian, I would not like to hear him 
rcYile Mohammedanism. If I talk with a man from some 
other communion who has come into our church, I think 
the less and not the more of his churchmanship if he is 
always ready to defame the mother that bore him. If 
you are a more liberal belicYer than you used to be, the 
best proof that you can giYe of it will be in gratefully 
honoring the narrower creed in which you liYcd and by 
whose power you grew up and passed on. 

Such is the messg^ge of our story to the man who has 
already advanced to larger truth than he once held. 
And when he turns from looking back and still looks 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 139 

forward, when he hopes still to advance, then it has 
something else to say to him. It bids him hold fast all 
the truth that he has learned, to hold it all the faster 
because he knows it is not final. The preciousness of 
every particle of truth ! That is the lesson. If one 
gives me a diamond to carry across the sea, I may 
estimate its value and know just how much poorer I 
shall be and the world will be if I let it drop into the 
water and it sinks to the bottom. But if one gives me 
a seed of some new fruit to bring to this new land, 
I look at it with awe. It is mysteriously valuable. I 
cannot tell what preciousness is in it. Harvests on 
harvests, food for whole generations, are shut up in its 
little bulk. There always must be a difference as to the 
essential value set on truth, between him who thinks 
that truth is final and him who thinks that truth is 
germinal, between him who thinks it a diamond and him 
who thinks it a seed. It is a great mistake to think 
that a man will value a truth more if you teach him 
that it is the end of truth, than if you teach him that 
it is only the beginning. N"athanael clings all the more 
closely to the certainty that Jesus saw him under the 
fig-tree, because of the promise that he shall **' see greater 
things than these." In the name of all you hope to 
know, cling close to what you know already. Make 
much of it, live up to it, count it very precious, hold it 
fast in the bosom of a loving life. Briiigjvhat you have 
and put it reverently into the Master's h ands that He 
may mak e it m ore. It is not good for any man to let 
the vastness of unknown truth make him disparage the 
little that he knows. It is good for him to count his 
little precious because it is of the same kind with, 



140 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

and may introduce him to, the greater after which he 
aspires. 

I must not linger longer upon the application of our 
story to the matter of belief and truth. More interest- 
ing still are the ways in which it applies to character, 
and especially to the religious life. In all training of 
character the law of continuity and economy must be 
supreme. We often do not think so. We are ready to 
fancy that character can be spasmodic, a thing of con- 
stant new creations, of abrupt and sudden changes. I 
think that is the idea with which almost all people 
start in life. By and by, as life goes on, and they find 
that character does not change but perpetuates itself, 
they are very apt to turn to the other extreme and to 
believe that character once fixed is fixed forever, and so 
to settle into hopelessness. Hosts of young men are 
reckless because they believe that by and by they can 
be what they will. Hosts of old men are hopeless 
because it seems impossible that they can ever be any- 
•thing but what they are. But both are wrong. Not 
lawlessness, and not slavish subjection to law, is the 
system under which we live. Progress and growth ; but 
growth from old conditions, progress from the basis of 
the old life ; this is our law. A man comes to you and 
says, " I have always been a bad man, and I never can 
be anything else." You answer him, if you are a true 
servant of Christ, '^ Poor soul, you little know the hope 
for all of us which is in Him who can make all things 
new." Another man comes and says, " I have been a 
bad man, but I am going to break with all my past, to 
live as if it all had never been, to be throughout another 
man." Again you must reply, " Poor soul, that too is 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 141 

impossible. Be as different as you will, you must be 
the same man still. Your future must come out of your 
past. Your old failures, your old hopes, your old resolu- 
tions, your old shames, these cannot all be wasted. They 
can be wonderfully transformed, but they cannot be 
thrown away." The good man stands at last, the true 
man, fed with truth and glorifyhig God in daily action. 
But he learns more and more that he is the same with 
the old man whose memory he hates. He has been 
made anew, but it is the old humanity out of which the 
new life has been evoked. Is not this what many a 
poor creature needs to know ? You understand that you 
are wicked. You understand what it is to be good. 
But the gulf between is dreadful and impassable. What 
i^ there in you that can grow into that ? Nothing, 
nothing, that can grow into that of its own strength. 
You must go on forever, and be forever what you are, 
unless some higher power touches you. But none the 
less is it true that when that higher power touches you 
it must make what you are to be out of what you are 
already. The development out of the old still needs 
the mightier force. Evolution is not atheism. God 
must do what must be done, but God will do it. 
God will make you good, by sending His light and love 
into this past of yours and giving all that there is good 
in it its true development and consecration. 

How natural this method is. How necessarily any 
one who tries to do the work of God falls into God's 
ways of doing it. Never are you so near to God as 
Avhen you try to help some miserable sinner to a better 
life. And how instinctively you take God's method then. 
Here is a poor outcast with a wretched, wicked, it may 



142 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

be a hideous life. How will you go to work to lift that 
wretchedness ? Will you not try to find something in 
all that life that you can speak to, something that you 
can cultivate and make to grow ? You find perhaps 
some one affection. The mother's love is left when 
everything else seems to have gone in brutishness. The 
power to feel a kindness* is still there when the power 
to feel a blow has long since died. The sensitiveness 
to the cry of need is still alive when the ear can no 
longer hear the calls and threats of duty. Shame lingers 
where ambition has departed. To these you speak. 
Over the life of each poor outcast you let your hands 
wander till, in the midst of all the death, they find one 
spot which, however feebly, trembles with life. You 
can do nothing till you have found that. When you 
have found that, everything is possible. my dear 
friends, if you have not learned it, this is the lesson you 
must learn. If you are moved with a vague desire to 
help men be better men, you must know that you can 
do it not by belaboring the evil but by training the good 
that there is in them. If you could kill all a man's sins 
you would only make him a less bad man. You would 
not make him a better man. That you could make him 
only by developing his goodness. So imitate your Lord. 
When you stand face to face with a hungry-eyed creat- 
ure whom you want to feed with better life, be sure 
that you imitate your Lord. Be sure that you begin by 
asking him '' How many loaves have you, my poor 
friend ? What can you give me to begin with ? What 
has God done for you already ? Show me your, best, 
and we will pray to God together that as you put it into 
His hands He will bless it and multiply it, till your 



HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 143 

whole life is fed with the grace which is all His but 
which He has made yours by bidding it work upon the 
substance of what He had given you already." 

Tlie unreality of conversion ! The inability of a man 
to realize that he can be the subject of such a change, 
can enter upon such a new life as he hears other men 
describe ! Surely you recognize that unreality. Where 
does it come from ? Is it not largely from the fact that 
men do not understand this truth of the continuity 
and economy of grace. This is the fundamental truth 
about conversion. Not to sweep the old manhood off 
and make a new one in its place ; but to make a new 
manhood out of the old one, that is what God's Spirit is 
always trying to do. If I could picture God's Spirit 
coming for the first time to a soul ; if I could forget that 
all our descriptions of the Spirit coming to the soul of 
man are figures, because God's Spirit has been with 
every soul from its first moment; if I could picture 
God's Spirit coming for the first time to your soul, I can 
imagine only one beginning of His work. '^ How many 
loaves have you ? " " What is there for me to go to 
work on here ? " An honorable love of truth, an un- 
swerving business faithfulness, a keen, quick sensitive- 
ness to the rights of others, a tender pity which leaps 
up at the sight of suffering. The Spirit finds these 
there. These, and what are they? They are not re- 
ligion. 0, no ! surely they are not. More and more 
clear, I think, it grows that they are not. More and 
more distinctly over our human life, with all its best 
affections, hangs the serene heaven of the divine life, 
the heaven of the love of God into Avhich our human 
affections must enter before they become religious. 



144 HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? 

into which they cannot enter till they have been born 
again. No ! These which the Spirit finds in you are 
not religion. Never let yourself think that they are, and 
so depreciate and disregard the work which the Spirit has 
to do in you. They are not religion ; but they are the 
material of the religious life. They are the part of your 
nature in which you may become religious. They are 
the stone in your nature out of which the temple may 
be built. When the temple is built out of that native 
stone, no less wonderful, indispensable, and gracious 
will appear the skill of the Architect, without whom it 
never could have been ; yet still the temple, standing 
there with its divine strength and beauty of tower and 
pinnacle, will be real to you, will be your temple while 
it is God's, because of the nativeness of the stone from 
which God made it. The love of truth, touched by God, 
has been lifted into a sublime aspiration after Him. 
The business faithfulness has been transfigured into the 
patient doing of His will. The regard for the rights of 
others has been exalted into a " passionate desire that 
every man should^ have the chance to do, and be his 
best. And pity for men's sorrows lias been changed 
into a lofty honor for man's value as the son of God in 
Christ. How shall we tell what has come to pass ? Let 
us take St. Peter's great words, " Until the day dawn 
and the day-star arise in your hearts." The coming of 
God's Spirit is the rising of the sun. The world is a 
new world when the sun has arisen. Light and life 
filling it everywhere proclaim how new it is. But the 
sunrise needs a world already there to sliine upon, and 
it is out of the same old mountains and valleys which 
have been dreary in the darkness that it makes its 
miracles of light. 



HOW MANY LOa 145 

That is conversion. Would tlia. ^'t, 

so that it need not seem so unnatura. 
it need not seem so impossible for them, 
is true about every progress of the Christian 
higher and higher, even to the highest Christ. 
Continuity and economy ; these are the laws ol 
who is leading us, the Captain of our salvation, i^ 
always binds the future to the past, and He wastes noth- 
ing. 0, there are some here who want to get away 
from all their past ; who, if they could, would fain begin 
a.11 over again. Their life with Christ seems one long 
^failure. But you must learn, you must let God teach 
you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to get 
a future out of it. God will waste nothing. There 
is something in your past, something, even if it only be 
the sin of which you have repented, which, if you can / 
put into the Savior's hands, will be a new life for you. ■ 
Doubt that ; doubt that God in all these years has given 
you something through which He may give you vastly 
more if you will let Him, and what reasonable concep- 
tion have you left of God ? I think it is a dreadful thing 
to hear a man or woman say, " I have been a Christian, 
I have tried to serve God for such and such a number of 
years, and it has been all a mistake." 0, how little they 
know God, to think it could have been a mistake ! It 
is as much a wrong to the honor of God to disown what 
He has done for us, as to disown what He has done for 
any other man ; and yet we very often call it humility. 

We want to honor our own present as the material 
for a possible future. In order that we may honor it we 
must know how Christ honors it. He honors it for 
what it can produce in His hands. He honors it as a 

10 



146 .VES HAVE YE ? 

ser .times of how, if the Lord had 

v/ho were laostly farmers instead of 

./ould have made them another parable. 

lie lost sheep on the mountains, He would 

,. of the lost seed on the barn floor. Instead 

of v5''- love that sought the wanderer and brought it to 

' ; e fold, He would have wonderfully pictured the love 

that found the trampled grain, with all its power of life, 

and buried it in the rich ground. 

" How many loaves have you ? " It is the Lord's 
first question ; and the hands of those who really want 
His help, search their robes to see what they have hid- 
den there. One brings his joy ; another brings his 
pain ; another brings his helpless desire ; another brings 
his poor resolution ; another has nothing to bring ex- 
cept just his sorrow that he has nothing. It is a poor 
collection ; only seven loaves, and a few little fishes ; but 
it is enough. His blessing falls upon them, and they 
come back to the souls which gave them up to Him, 
multiplied into the means of healthy, holy, happy life. 

May God help us all, every day of our lives, to come 
to Christ just as we are, that He may make us more 
and more just what we ought to be. 



\ 



IX. 

THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 

A THANKSGIVING SERMON. 

'' And He said unto me : Son of Man, stand upon thy feet, and I will 
speak unto thee." — Ezek. ii. 1. 

There are many passages in the Bible which describe 
the servants of God, as their Lord's messages came to 
them, falling upon their faces on the earth, and in that 
attitude of most profound humiliation listening to v/hat 
God had to say. Moses, Joshua, David, Daniel, they 
are all seen at one time or another prostrate, and signi- 
fying their readiness to receive v^hat God should teU 
them by the complete disowning of anything like worth 
or dignity in themselves. There is a great truth set 
forth in all such pictures. It is that only to human 
humility can God speak intelligibly. Only when a 
man is humble can he hear and understand the words of 
God. But in the passage which I have taken for my 
text this morning, there is another picture with another 
truth. When God was going to give a message to 
Ezekiel, He said to him, " Son of man, stand upon thy 
feet and I will speak unto thee." Not on his face but 
on his feet ; not in the attitude of humiliation but in the 
attitude of self-respect ; not stripped of all strength, and 
lying like a dead man waiting for life to be given him, 
but strong in the intelligent consciousness of privilege. 



148 THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 

and standing alive, ready to co-operate with the living- 
God who spoke to him ; so the man now is to receive 
the word of God. I hope that we shall be able to 
comprehend this idea largely and truly enough to see 
that it is not contradictory to the other, but certainly it 
is different from it. When God raised Ezekiel and set 
him on his feet before He spoke to him, was it not a 
declaration of the truth that man might lose the words 
of God because of a low and grovelling estimate of 
himself, as well as because of a conceited one ? The 
best understanding of God could come to man only 
when man was upright and self-reverent in his privilege 
as the child of God. 

If this be true, is it not a great truth ? Is it not a 
truth well worthy of being set out in one of these 
graphic Bible-pictures, and one that needs continually 
to be preached ? The other truth is often urged upon 
us ; that if we are proud we shall be ignorant ; if we do 
not listen humbly we shall listen in vain to hear the 
Divine voice of which the world is full. We are 
pointed continually to men on every side who have 
evidently no wisdom but their own, because they have 
never deeply felt that they needed any other, and who, 
therefore, are filling the land with their foolishness. 
But this other truth is not so often preached, nor, I 
think, so generally felt; unless you honor your life 
you cannot get God's best and fullest wisdom ; unless 
you stand upon your feet you will not hear God speak 
to you. 

There is much to-day of thoughtless and foolish depre- 
ciation of man and his condition. I want upon Thanks- 
giving Day, in the light of the Thanksgiving truth, 



THE NEED OF SELF-RESPECT. 149 

to enter a quiet, earnest and profoundly sincere pro- 
test against it. I want to claim that it is blind to 
facts. I want to assert that it is not truly humble. I 
want to denounce it as the very spirit of ignorance, shut- 
ting men's ears hopelessly against the hearing of all the 
highest truth. The question comes to us most press- 
ingiy to-day. Shall we, can we, thank God for His 
mercies,- standing upon our feet and rejoicing that we 
are men, thoroughly grateful for the real joy of life ? 
Back of all the special causes for thanksgiving which 
our hearts recognize, is there a thankfulness for that 
on which they all rest and in which they are sewn like 
jewels in a cloth of gold ; for the mere fact of human 
life, for the mere privilege and honor of being men and 
women ? If there is not this, no gratitude is possible ; 
or only such a gratitude as the poor wretch in his 
dungeon, for whom life has been robbed of every charm, 
feels to his jailor who thrusts through the window to 
him the crust of bread and jug of water which are to 
prolong his miserable life. It may seem like an awful 
and unreasonable question ; but indeed it is not so. 
The latest, and in many quarters the favorite, philosophy 
of the day, — - that which boasts itself as being the su- 
preme achievement of the nineteenth century, the perfect 
flower of the w^isdom of mankind, — is that wdiich 
under its fantastic name of Pessimism, declares deliber- 
ately that human life is a woe and a curse, and that the 
" will to live " is the fiend which persecutes humanity, 
which must be utterly destroyed before man can be 
happy. So speaks philosophy ; and when we talk with 
unphilosophical men who have no theory, I think we are 
astonished to see how their view of life is essentially what 



150 THE NEED OF SELF-RESPECT. 

this philosophy would give them. Either in the soft 
way or the hard way, either in sentimental whimper- 
ings or in dogged, rude defiance, men are saying that 
life is miserable. Either in large or little view, either 
looking at the great course of history or at the petty 
course of their own lives, men say the world is growing 
worse from day to day. The calm pessimism of the 
schools becomes the querulous discontent of the street 
philosopher, or the bitter cynicism of the newspaper 
satirist, or, what is far more significant than either, the 
silent distress and bewilderment of the man who sees 
no bright hope for himself or fellow-man. I am sure 
you know whereof I speak. In large circles of life (and 
they are just those circles in which a great many of us 
live) there is an habitual disparagement of human life, 
its joys and its prospects. Man is on his face. It 
seems to me that he must hear God's voice calling him 
to another attitude, or he is hopeless. " Son of man, 
stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee." 

What shall we say then of this prevalent depression 
as to the character and hopes of our human life, which 
is, I think, one of the symptoms of our time ? Some- 
times it is very sweeping and talks despairingly of man 
in general. Sometimes it is special and merely believes 
that our own age or our own land is given up to moral 
corruption and decay. As to its general character, I 
think it may be said that it comes from an inspection 
of humaii life which is neither the shallowest nor the 
deepest. Ic has got below the surface facts and first 
appearances o^ things, but it has not got down to their 
essential and central truth. The surface of the earth is 
warm with the direct rays of the sun. The centre of 



THE NEEP OF S] 

the earth, perhaps, is warm w^ 
quenchless fire. But betwee 

below the warm surface, and LC:;c:i:: jui. c^j^i^^.^^ ci^o 
warm heart of the globe, it is all cold and damp and 
dark and dreary. And so there is the surface sight of 
life, which is bright and enthusiastic. There is the 
sight of life which is deeper than this, which is sad and 
puzzled. There is the deepest sight of all, which is 
bright again with a truer light, and enthusiastic again 
with a soberer but a more genuine happiness. The 
character of the first sight, the most simple and super- 
ficial, very few people will be inclined to dispute. There 
are not many misanthropes who will deny that the first 
aspect of things which meets the eye of man is tempting 
and exhilarating. The external world is too manifestly 
beautiful ; the sun is too bright, the fields too green, the 
sea too blue, the breeze too fresh, the luxuries of taste 
and sound and smell too manifold and sweet; the hu- 
man frame is strung too thickly with the faculties ot 
pleasure ; the first and universal relationships of men, 
friendship and childhood and fatherhood, are too spon- 
taneous sources of delight for any reasonable man to 
say that the first and simplest aspect of human life is 
not a happy thing. The charm may be only apparent, 
but at least there is an apparent charm. These men 
may be very foolish to find such joy in life, but cer- 
tainly the men whom we see do find joy in it. To the 
child it is all joyous. Sometimes the light foot breaks 
through the thin crust for a moment, but the spring of 
the young walker sets him the next instant on the 
crust again, with only sufficient sense of danger to ex- 
hilarate, not to depress. And many men who never 



THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 

cease to be children keep the first sight of life all 
through, and never see below its bright surface nor hear 
another sound behind tlie music of its most palpable 
delights. So that the first /'aspect of life makes the 
bright optimist which every live and healthy boy ought 
to be and is. But this is only on the surface, as most 
men soon find out. It is real but superficial. By and 
by the exceptions and the contradictions and the limi- 
tations begin to show themselves. This first happiness 
of life is spotted with unhappiness ; and it is not enough, 
even if it were unspotted, to satisfy the man who tries 
to find his satisfaction in it. Then comes the danc^er of 
misanthropy. There, just below the surface, lie the 
abject or defiant misanthropes ; the men who count the 
sick people till they say there is no healthy who count 
the dull days till they say there is no sunshine, who 
count the failures till they say there is no success, who 
count the frauds till they declare there is no honesty, 
and the fools till they laugh at the idea of wisdom. 
You see they have crawled down out of the sunlight. 
They have left the surface and its simple presumptions 
to burrow just under them among the exceptions and 
contradictions. They keep the same idea of what the 
purpose of life is and what sort of happiness it ought to 
have ; only, while the boy in his optimism cried, as he 
saw the bird flash up in the sunlight, " Here it is," the 
middle-aged pessimist creeps with the mole underground 
and says, "It is not anywhere." Now what comes 
deeper still ? What is there more profound than the 
lamentations over the sin and misery of life, which have 
succeeded to the first enthusiastic praise of everything, 
which came first of all ? What is the next step if a 



THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 153 

man can take it ? I ans^ver, certainly a new idea of 
what life is for, of what happiness a man really needs ; 
that is what must come. The notion of education and 
of character as the end of life, of something which a man 
is to be made, and by the power to make which all of 
life's experiences are to be judged, that opens to a man ; 
and as he passes into that he finds the heat beginning 
to glow once more around him. He is coming in to 
the warm centre of the world. There come forth adap- 
tations for the higher work in things which have seemed 
wholly unfitted to produce the lower. Things which 
never could have made a man happy, develop a power 
to make him strong. Strength and not happiness, or 
rather only that happiness which comes by strength, is 
recognized as the end of human living. And with that 
test and standard the lost order and beauty reappear. 
The world is man s servant and friend ; and man, full of 
the deeper self-respect, is ready to hear deeper and 
diviner messages of God. 

This is the order. This is the way in which we pass 
to deeper knowledge, which is alwaj^s tending to the 
happiest knowledge of our own life. First, life is a 
success because the skies are bright and the whole world 
is beautiful. Then life is a failure because every joy is 
in danger of disappointment, and every confidence may 
prove untrue. Then life is a success again because 
through disappointment and deceit it still has power to 
make a man pure and strong. He who has delighted in 
the outside pleasures and then bowed down in misery 
because they disappeared, rises up at last and stands 
upon his feet when he discovers that God has a far 
deeper purpose about him than to keep him gay and 



154 THE NEED OF SELF-RESPECT. 

cheerful, and that is to make him go6d ; and with that 
deepest intention no accidents can interfere ; with that 
discovery all his despair disappears, and a self-respect, 
which is full of hope and ready for intelligence, comes 
in its place. 

This is the way in which a man's despair or contempt 
about himself is thoroughly undermined, by his get- 
ting: a truer view of what the world and all its treat- 
ments of man's life are for. But now, I think, another 
fact comes in. Many men own the possibility of good 
which is open to them, while still they are despairing 
or cynical about the world itself, about the course of 
human life in general. There are many good people, I 
believe, who devoutly recognize the chance of character, 
of spiritual culture, which is offered to them by living 
in the midst of a world of sin and sorrow; but the 
sinful and sorrowful world itself seems to them despe- 
rate. They may be purified, but the fire that purifies 
them is the burning up of a miserable world. This is 
the strange hopelessness about the world, joined to a 
strong hope for themselves, which we see in many good 
religious people. It is what really lies at the heart of 
all the exclusive and seemingly selfish systems of re- 
ligion, what makes it possible for good men to believe 
in election. In their own hearts they recognize indu- 
bitably that God is saving them, while the aspect of the 
world around them seems to show them that the world 
is going to perdition. That is a common enough condi- 
tion of mind ; but I think it may be surely said that 
it is not a good, nor can it be a permanent, condition. 
God has mercifully made us so that no man can con- 
stantly and purely believe in any great privilege for 



THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 155 

himself unless he believes in at least the possibility of 
the same privilege for other men. A man's hold on his 
own j)rivilege either disappears or grows impure the 
moment that he gives the rest of the world up in de- 
spair. Under this principle, no man who believes that 
the world at large is growing hopelessly worse, can 
keep a lively and effectual hope that he himself is grow- 
ins: better. Indeed this is the dauQ-er of that current 
habit of depreciating man, and especially of depreciating 
our own times and surroundings, which is very common 
among us. It is not merely a speculative opinion. It 
is an influence which must reach a man's character. A 
man can have no high respect for himself unless he has 
a high respect for his human kind. He can have no 
strong hope for himself unless he has a strong hope for 
his human kind. And so, whatever be his pure tastes 
and lofty principles, one trembles for any man whom he 
hears hopelessly decrying human life in general, or the 
special condition of his own time. 

It is time, perhaps, that we looked a little more 
closely at this, which is no doubt a notable and alarm- 
ing characteristic of our time; the number of intelli- 
gent men who think and talk despairingly of human 
nature and of human life. You meet them everywhere. 
Their books are on your tables. Their talk is in your 
ears at every corner of the streets. Where has this fact, 
then, come from if it is, as we believe, the growingly 
prominent characteristic of our generation ? It is not 
hard to point out some of its sources. , Sometimes, with 
some men, it is a deliberate philosophy. Some of our 
brightest men have, as I said, really reasoned- about the 
world, and have come to the conclusion that it is bad 



156 THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 

and not good, and that it is growing worse and not 
better. It is the issue of all the fatalistic philosophies, 
and we all know how the strong interest of men in the 
working of second causes, and in the uniformity of law, 
has aroused a tendency to fatalism in almost all de- 
paTtments of thinking. Make all life a machine, and 
the individual is lost ; with individual life, goes respon- 
sibility ; with responsibility, go hope and chance. This 
is the way in which the philosophical pessimism of our 
time is made. It begins by the denial of the individual 
and his free will ; and then, with the only pov/er capable 
of moral goodness taken out, the universe is left un- 
moral, and an unmoral universe becomes immoral. Its 
salt is gone and its corruption comes. 

But the number of speculative pessimists is small ; 
the number of believers in the badness of the world is 
large. Where do the rest of them come from ? In 
large part, I believe, from another characteristic of our 
time, from the strong feeling of interest in, and respon- 
sibility for, the world's condition, which comes from the 
increased activity of mind and conscience, and which 
begets often narrowness of view about the world's con- 
dition. A thousand men to-day care whether the state 
is pure, for one who cared in the last century. A thou- 
sand eyes are anxiously watching the church, for one 
that looked to see whether she did her work a hundred 
years ago. A thousand hearts sink at a catastrophe in 
the purity of social life, where once only one felt the 
disgrace. Out of all this watchfulness has come a sen- 
sitiveness and a narrowness. Because our own age has 
its vices which distress us, we forget the vices of other 
times, and we let ourselves judge the world by that bit 



THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 157 

of the world which is just under our own eyes. When 
one thing is being done here in IsTew England, just the 
opposite thing may be coming to pass on the Ganges or 
the Nile. Almost every day yon hear men assuming 
that, because America happens to have grown from a 
very poor country to a very rich one within the last 
century^ and has developed, of course, the vices that be- 
long to wealth, therefore the world is worse to-day than 
it was a century ago. It is vastly unreasonable, but it 
is very natural for a conscientious American to think so. 
Only when he lifts up his eyes and finds it simply im- 
possible to let them fall on any century in all the world's 
history which was better than this ; any century when 
government was purer, thought or action freer, society 
sweeter, the word of man more sacred than it is to-day, 
only then does he come back and recognize how he has 
been allowing the nearness and pressingness of his own 
circumstances to delude him. 

But yet, again, this time of ours, these men of ours, 
are marked by a singular depth of personal experience. 
The personal emotions, the anxieties with regard to per- 
sonal conditions, are very intense. It is a time of much 
morbidness, and so I think that the danger under which 
men always labor, of letting the universe take the color 
of the windows of their own life through which they look 
at it, was never so dangerous as to-day. More men to- 
day think the world is wretched because they are sad 
and bewildered, than would have transferred their own 
conditions to the outside universe in less introspective 
and self-conscious times. The simplest men in the 
simplest ages, when they were in sorrow, opened their 
windows inward to let the world's sunlight in. The 



158 THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 

elaborate and subtle men in the elaborate and subtle 
ages, in their sorrow, open their windows outward and 
darken the bright world with their darl^ness. And 
among such men, in such an age, we live. 

And one point more. When all these causes, in a 
time like ours, have set a few earnest, serious, sad men 
to the hard task of depreciating human life, then it be- 
comes the fashion, and all the light, flippant tongues 
catch up their cry and repeat it. A few strong men go 
wrapt in melancholy because they so intensely feel the 
evil of the world, and straightway every weakling who 
wants to be thouo;ht wise must twist his cloak about his 
head too, and go stalking tragically among his fellow- 
men, — blind in his mock misery, stumbling over them 
and making them stumble over him. This was the 
Byronism of the generation of our fathers, and this is 
a large part of the pessimism of ours. Sometimes it 
scowls and frowns and scolds ; sometimes it smiles and 
bows as it declares that religion and politics and social 
life and personal character are hurrying to ruin ; but it 
is an affectation and a fashion, and is to be discriminated 
carefully, and set aside in contempt, when we are trying 
to estimate what there is really respectable and signifi- 
cant in the present defamation of humanity. 

Such is a statement of some of the reasons, the prin- 
cipal ones I think, why men have come to talk of their 
race and its hopes as we very often hear them talk 
to-day. They are connected, as you see, with much 
that is noblest in our age. All together they produce 
this condition of distrust and fear and wonder about 
what is coming, with a certain preference for believing 
that something very bad is coming, with which we ^ are 



THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 159 

all of US familiar. Men are off their feet, as it were. 
They are demoralized. There is less readiness to assert 
the essential nobleness and lofty destiny of man. A 
state of things like this seems to me to be significant as 
to where we stand in the world's moral history. We 
have passed ont of the first light-heartedness of youth. 
We are preparing, by disappointment and bewilderment, 
for the more serious and earnest satisfactions of middle 
life. If you recall w^hat I said about the degrees or 
stages in men's conception of the world's character and 
prospects, you can apply it now to what I have just been 
saying. The light and airy optimism which believed that 
everything was right because the sun shone in the sky, 
is past for thoughtful mortals. You cannot persuade men 
to-day that the world is good because there are many 
pleasant things in it. They probably never will believe 
that in the old easy way again. Once having come to see 
that a pleasant world which is all full of sin and pain, 
is all the more dreadful because of its outside pleasant- 
ness, there is no return to the first easy satisfaction. 
The only two things that are still open to man are these : 
a blank despair, which gives itself up to inevitable de- 
terioration ; or a new thought of the world as a place of 
moral training where happiness or unhappiness are ac- 
cidents, but where, by both happiness and unhappiness, 
men and nations must be made and can be made just 
and pure and good. 

Which of these two are we bound for ? Surely the 
second, not the first. But to that second we can come 
only as we keep, in all our bewilderment over the 
world's misery and sin, the sense, the certainty of God. 
There is the point of all. If a man dwells upon the 



160 THE NEED OF SELF-RESPECT. 

misery of human life and does not believe in G od, he is 
dragged down among the brutes. If a man believes in 
the misery of human life and does believe in God, he is 
carried up to higher notions of God's government, which 
have loftier purposes than mere happiness or pain. The 
one great question about all the kind of temper of which 
I have spoken is whether it still believes in Crod. If it 
does, it must come out in light through whatever dark- 
ness it may have first to' pass. If it does not, however 
■wise it grows, it certainly must end in folly and despair. 
Whether our philosophy is theistic or atheistic ; whether 
you, as you look at the snarl of life with all its misery 
and sin, know for a surety that God is within it all ; 
these are the questions, the answer to which decides 
wdiether our philosophy and our observation of life are 
on their face or on their feet, are full of the curse of 
despair or full of the blessing of hope. 

For all belief in God is, must be, belief in ultimate 
good. No view of the universe can be despairing which 
keeps Him still in sight. " Ah," but you say, " do we 
not all believe in God ? Is there one of us that denies 
His existence ? " Probably not; only remember that 
there is an atheism which still repeats the creed. There 
is a belief in God which does not bring Him, nay, rather 
say which does not let Him come, into close contact with 
our daily life. The very reverence with which we honor 
God may make us shut Him out from the hard tasks and 
puzzling problems with which we have to do. Many of 
us who call ourselves theists are like the savages who, 
in the desire to honor the wonderful sun-dial which had 
been given them, built a roof over it. Break down the 
roof; let God in on your life. And then, however your 



THE NEED OF SELF-RESPECT. 161 

first light optimism may be broken up, and the evil 
of the world may be made known to you, you never can 
be crushed by it. You will stand strong on your feet 
and hear God when He comes to teach you the lessons 
of the higher, soberer, spiritual optimism to which they 
come who are able to believe that all things work to- 
gether for good to the man or the people that serve 
Him. 

That was the optimism of Jesus. There was no blind- 
ness in His eyes, no foolish indiscriminate praise of 
humanity upon His lips. He saw the sin of that first 
century and of Jerusalem a thousand times more keenly 
than you see the sins of this nineteenth century and of 
America. But He believed in God. Therefore He saw 
beyond the sin, salvation. He never upbraided the sin 
except to save men from it. He never beat the chains 
except to set the captive free ; never, as our cynics do, 
for the mere pleasure of their clanking. " Not to con- 
demn the world, but to save the world," was His story 
of His mission. And at His cross the shame and hope 
of humankind joined hands. 

that the truth of our Thanksgiving Day might be 
His truth ; the truth that all the sin we see, all the woe 
that is around us, are pledges dark and dreadful, but still 
certain pledges, of man's possible higher life. May I 
not beg you now to think whether you have been doing 
wholly right about the matter of which I have spoken 
to you to-day ? If you have been dwelling solely on the 
evil that is in man, or on the special evil which you 
think is in your church, your nation, or your age, see 
whether that habit has not blinded your intelligence and* 
weakened your strength. It has cast you down upon 

11 



162 THE NEED OF SELF-EESPECT. 

your face. Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand 
up upon your feet ! Believe in man ! Soberly and with 
clear eyes believe in your own time and place. There 
is not, and there has never been, a better time or a better 
place to live in. Only with this belief can you believe 
in hope and believe in work. Only to a self-respect 
which stands erect in conscious privilege, erect for ex- 
pected duty, can God speak His great and blessed 
messages and be completely understood. 



X. 

THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

**As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, 
Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have 
called them. And when they had fasted and prayed and laid their 
hands on them, they sent them away." — Acts xiiL 2, 3. 

The work was foreign missions. The disciples in 
Judea were sending out two of their number to preach 
the gospel in other parts of Asia and, by and by, in 
Europe. And therefore these words belong to us to-day, 
upon this one Sunday in the year when we give our 
especial thoughts to the foreign missionary work. This 
Sunday always comes back to us with the same feeling 
and color. It enters in among our common Sundays 
with a larger power than belongs to them. It seems as 
if the arms of Christ were stretched out a little more 
widely. As sometimes when our Lord was preaching 
in the temple, those who stood nearest to Him and 
caught His words the freshest from His lips, those to 
whom His words had been long familiar, must have 
seen Him lift up His eyes and look across their heads 
to the multitude beyond who stood upon the outskirts 
of the crowd ; and as, while they watched Him finding 
out and speaking to those strangers, their own thoughts 
of Him must have enlarged ; as, perhaps at first sur- 
prised and jealous, they must have come to understand 
Him more and love Him better for this new sight of 



164 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

His love for all men, — so it is with us to-day. Indeed 
there is no feeling which the Jew had when he found 
that what had been his religion was going to become the 
possession of the world, which does not repeat itself 
now in men's minds when they hear their gospel de- 
manding of them to send it to the heathen. It must 
have been a surprise and bewilderment at first to find 
that they were not the final objects of God's care, but 
only the medium through which the light was to shine 
that it mioht reach other men. I can conceive that 
Joseph and Mary may have wondered why those Gen- 
tiles should have come out of the East to worship their 
Messiah. But very soon the enlargement of their faith 
to be the world's heritage proved its power by making 
their faith a far holier thing for them than it could have 
been if it had remained wholly their own. Christ was 
more thoroughly theirs when through them He had 
been manifested to the Gentiles. And so always the 
enlargement of the faith brings the endearment of the 
faith, and to give the Savior to others makes Him more 
thoroughly our own. 

With this thought let me speak to you to-day. Let 
me plead for the foreign missionary idea as the neces- 
sary completion of the Christian life. It is the apex to 
which all the lines of the pyramid lead up. The Chris- 
tian life without it is a mangled and imperfect thing. 
The glory and the heroism of Christianity lies in its 
missionary life. This is the subject of which I wish to 
speak to you this morning. 

The event which is recorded in the text, the departure 
of the disciples on their first missionary journey, was a 
distinct epoch in the history of Christianity. There had 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 165 

been some anticipations of it. The gospel had been 
preached to the Samaritans. Philip had baptized the 
Ethiopian. Peter had carried his message to the Eoman 
centurion. But now for the first time a distinct, de- 
liberate, irrevocable step was taken, and two disciples 
turned their back upon the home of Judaism, which 
had been thus far the home of Christianity, and went 
forth with the world before them. They went indeed 
in the first place to the Jews who lived in foreign lands ; 
but when they went away from Judea they started on a 
work from which there was no turning back and which 
could not be limited. Before they had been many weeks 
upon their journey, it had become distinctly a mission to 
the Gentiles. And now, from tlie time when Paul and 
Barnabas went out upon this mission, the body of the 
disciples divides itself into two parts. There are the 
disciples who stay at home and manage affairs in Jeru- 
salem, and there are the disciples who go abroad to tell 
the story of the cross. Peter and James are in Jerusa- 
lem. Paul and Barnabas and Luke go wandering to 
Ephesus and Athens and Corinth. And, as we read our 
Bibles, gradually the history detaches itself from the 
Holy City. The interest of Christianity does not linger 
with the wise and faithful souls who stay at home. 
Peter and James pass out of our thought. It is Paul, 
with his fiery zeal and eager tongue, restless to find 
some new ears into which to pour the story of his Mas- 
ter ; it is he in whom the interest of Christianity is 
concentrated. He evidently represents its spirit. Its 
glory and its heroism are in him. The other disciples 
seem to feel this. They recognize that it is coming. 
They are almost like John the Baptist when he beheld 



166 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

Jesus. As they come down to the ship to see their 
companions embark, as they fast and pray and lay their 
hands on them and send them away, there is a solemnity 
about it all which is like the giving up of the most pre- 
cious privilege of their work, its flower and crown, to 
these its missionaries ; and they turn back to their ad- 
ministrative work at home as to a humbler and less 
heroic task. 

The relation of the disciples who stayed at home to 
the disciples who went abroad to preach is the perpetual 
relation of the home pastor to the foreign missionary. 
The work of the two is not essentially different. It is 
essentially the same. Both have the same gospel to 
proclaim. But the color of their lives is different. Paul 
is heroic. James is unheroic, or is far less heroic. I think 
as we go on we shall see that those words have very 
clear meanings. They are not vague. But even before 
we have defined them carefully they express a feeling 
with which the missionary and the pastor impress us. 
Heroism is in the very thought of missions. Patient de- 
votedness, but nothing heroic, is associated with the min- 
istry of him who works for the building up of Christian 
lives where Christianity already is the established faith| 

I am sure that I speak for a very great many of mj 
brethren in the home ministry when I say that we fee 
this continually. " Sent to tell men of Christ," — thalj 
is our commission. And men certainly need to be told 
of Christ over and over again. Those who have known 
Him longest need to hear His name again and again ir 
their temptations, their troubles, their joys. We need 
to tell men of Him all their lives, until we whispei^ 
His familiar name into their ears just growing dull ir 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 167 

death. I rejoice to tell you of Him always, those of you 
who have heard of Him most and longest ; but you can 
imagine, I am sure, how, standing here in your presence, 
and letting my thought wander off to a foreign land 
where some missionary is standing face to face with 
people who never heard of Christ before, I feel that that 
man is '' telling men of Christ " in a realler, directer way 
than I am. He is coming nearer to the heart, the true 
idea and meaning of the work we both are doing, than I 
am. We are like soldiers holding the fortress. He is 
the soldier who makes the sally and really does the 
fighting. I know the answer. I know what some of 
you are saying in your hearts whenever we talk together 
about foreign missions. "There are heathen here in 
Boston," you declare ; " heathen enough here in Amer- 
ica. Let us convert them first, before we go to China." 
That plea we all know, and I think it sounds more 
cheap and more shameful every year. What can be 
more shameful than to make the imperfection of our 
Christianity at home an excuse for not doing our work 
abroad ? It is as shameless as it is shameful. It pleads 
for exemption and indulgence on the ground of its own 
neglect and sin. It is like a murderer of his father ask- 
ing the judge to have pity on his orphanhood. Even 
the men w^ho make such a plea feel, I think, how un- 
heroic it is. The minister who does what they bid him 
do feels his task of preaching to such men perhaps all 
the more necessary but certainly all the less heroic, as 
he sees how utterly they have failed to feel the very 
nature of the gospel which he preaches to them. 

But I must come closer to our subject. " The heroism 
of Christianity lies in its missionary life." And let us 



168 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

start with this. Every great interest and work of men 
has its higher and its lower, its heroic and its iinheroic 
phases. Take public life for instance. Two servants of 
the people work together in the same office, and both 
alike are faithful, both are honest. Both try to do their 
duty. But one thinks of the state and of that interest of 
the state for which he labors, as serving him. The other 
thinks of himself as serving the state. There is the dif- 
ference. To one the currents of life flow inward towards 
the centre, which is his person. To the other the cur- 
rents of life flow outward tow^ards the interests for which 
he lives. So it is with every man's profession. Of two 
men who are practising law, one dwells upon the idea 
of the law and gives himself to its development. The 
other dwells upon the idea of himself and considers that 
the law^ is given to him for his support. Of two doctors, 
one makes medicine his servant to build up his fame or 
fortune ; the other makes himself the servant of medi- 
cine, to give what strength there is in him to her develop- 
ment and application. In every one of your professions 
there are both kinds of workers. There are the men 
who are given to their work, and the men who consider 
that their work is given to them. Their methods may 
be just alike. They may study in the same school, read 
the same books^ work in the same of&ce ; but anybody 
who comes near them feels the difference. There is the 
heroic element in one, and the heroic element is absent 
in the other. 

And w^hat is true about a special occupation is true 
about life as a whole. The fundamental difference lies 
between the men who think that life is for them, that 
this great world of living things is the reservoir out of 



THE HEKOISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 169 

whicli they are to draw pleasure and good ; and the other 
men who think that they are for life, that in this uni- 
verse of living things there is a divine idea and purpose 
to which they, coming in their appointed time in the 
long ages, are to minister with what power of service 
they possess. Everywhere there runs this difference. 
It appears in men's thought about God. To one man 
God is a vast means, working for his comfort. To an- 
other man God is a vast end, to which his powers strive 
to make their contribution. Everywhere there runs this 
difference. And it is just this larger conception of life 
everywhere to which the name heroic properly belongs. 
This largeness involves unselfishness. The heroic pub- 
lic man or lawyer or doctor or liver of human life is 
he who gives himself to his interest instead of asking 
his interest to give itself to him. The heroic moments 
in all of our most unheroic lives have been those in 
which we have been able to give ourselves to our art or 
occupation, counting our lives contributions to its idea, 
instead of demanding that it should give itself to us 
and contribute to our wealth or welfare. 

It is clear then, first of all, that heroism is not merely 
a thing^ of circumstances. There are two ideas which men 
are apt vulgarly to associate with their idea of a hero. 
One of them is prominence, and the other is suffering. 
The ordinary notion of a hero is either of a prominent 
and famous man, or of a man who has borne suffering 
manfully. Now it ma,y be that an unselfish and devoted 
life in such a* world as this in which Ave live has such a 
tendency to bring a man into hard conflict with the hard 
things about him, that pain will come to be a very 
frequent accompaniment of heroism. But evidently, if 



170 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

what I have said is true, there is no necessary company 
between them. There may be pain without heroism, 
pain inspired by selfishness, and making the man who 
suffers all the smaller and more self-involved. On the 
other hand there may be heroism without pain, self- 
devotion with all the circumstances of happiness. And 
so with regard to prominence. The essence of heroic 
life is the apprehension by any man of the idea of a 
cause, and the abandonment of his life to that idea. 
Such an abandonment, such a filling of his life with 
such an idea, will make him naturally the type-man of 
his cause, will set him in its fore-front and will bring 
him into conflict with all men who oppose his cause ; 
but these are accidents. In obscurity and luxury it 
may be that a man still is a hero. Even there he may 
fasten upon the idea of a cause and give himself up to 
it and effectively live for it, and if he does that he is a 
hero. In heaven all life will be heroic. Every being 
there will live for the divine ideas of things. No man 
will think that the golden streets and the hosts that fill 
them, and the unspeakable Majesty which sits in the 
centre of all upon the throne, are for him. Every soul 
will delight to count its eternity a contribution to them. 
But thgre will be no unhappiness, no pain in heaven. 
The accidents will have been changed, and will show 
that they were never more than accidents, but the 
essence of heroism will be the same forever. 

I put then as the first element of heroism this quality 
of Ideality ; the power, that is, of getting hold of the idea 
of any cause or occupation or of life in general, so that 
the cause, the occupation, or life becomes a living thing 
to which a man may give himseK with all his powers. 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 171 

That quality of ideality is the essential thing in heroism. 
There can be no hero without that. It is just what 
makes the difference between the '' dumb, driven cattle " 
and the " heroes in the strife." Look through the ranks 
of your profession. Are there not both cattle and heroes 
there ? Are there not times in your work when you are 
of the cattle sort, when the idea fades out of what you 
are doing, and nothing but the clatter of its machinery 
remains ? Alas for you if such times are in the pre- 
ponderance, if they are not lost in the general presence 
of the idea of your labor, making it an inspiration and 
making you heroic in your dedication to it. 

Along with this primary quality of all heroism there 
go two others, closely related to it. They are Magna- 
nimity and Bravery. The true hero is generous and 
brave. Whence comes his generosity ? Is it not of the 
very essence of his ideality. Let me be a scholar, for 
instance. The first question will be whether I have got 
hold of the idea of scholarship and have given myself to 
it. Am I studying for my own sake, to make myself 
famous or accomplished ; or am I studying for scholar- 
ship's sake, to make my branch of study more complete, 
to glorify and multiply the cause of knowledge in the 
world ? If the first, I have no real ground of sympathy 
with other scholars. I do not take a cordial interest in 
their success. I am not tempted to help them. I am 
tempted again and again to hinder them. I am open to 
all kinds of jealousy and spite and little-mindedness. 
If the latter, I am anxious for every other worker's 
success, as well as for my own. I am as glad of another 
man's discovery as if I had made it. I cannot be jealous 
of the light which some new hand flings on that subject 



172 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

which it is the object of my life to glorify. I will help 
every brother student as eagerly as I will help myself. 
Here is magnanimity. You see how closely it is bound 
up with ideality. The magnanimous public man is he 
who so lives for the ideas of his country that he is not 
jealous but glad when he sees other men doing more 
for the development of these ideas than he can do. The 
magnanimous churchman is he who cares so much for 
the church that he will help any other man's work for 
her as devotedly as if it were his own. The magnan- 
imous man is he who has so conceived the idea of man- 
hood, to whom humanity is so sublime a thing, that he 
will help another man to complete himself, to be as good 
and as great as he can be, with as much earnestness as 
he will expend in his own culture. Here is generosity. 
You see that it is not mere good-nature. It is most 
intelligent and has its reasons. And this is the second 
element of heroism. 

And the third element is Bravery, We can see how 
heroic bravery too belongs vdth the quality which dis- 
covers and fastens upon ideas. There are two kinds of 
bravery ; one which comes from the recollection of self, 
the other which comes from the forgetfulness of self. 
An Indian is brave when out of sheer pride he lets men 
drive their burning fagots into his flesh and utters no 
cry. A fireman is brave when for his duty he rushes 
into a burning house and, all scorched and bleeding, 
brings out the ransomed child. The first is brave by 
self-recollection. The second is brave by self-forgetful- 
ness. The first has gathered up all his self-possession 
and said, " iSTow I will not flinch or fear because it is 
unworthy of me." The second has cast all recollection 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 173 

of himself aside and said, " That child will die if I stay 
here." We need not ask which of these two braveries 
is heroic. There is a courage .that comes of fear. A 
man learns that on the whole it is safer in the world not 
to dodge and shirk, and so he goes on and meets life as 
it comes. There is nothing heroic about that. A man 
wants to run away, but because his fear of disgrace is 
greater than his fear of bullets he stays in the ranks and 
shuts his eyes and marches on. There is nothing heroic 
about that. A man is afraid as he sits alone and thinks 
about a task, but when he gets among his fellow-men, 
a mere contagious feeling takes possession of him and 
he is ready to fight and die because other men are light- 
ing or dying, like a dog in a pack of dogs. That is " the 
courage corporate that drags the coward to heroic death." 
There is nothing heroic about that. Only when a man 
seizes the idea and meaning of some cause, and in the 
love and inspiration of that is able to forget himself and 
go to danger fearlessly because of his great desire and 
enthusiasm, only then is bravery heroic. 

Ideality, magnanimity, and bravery then ; these are 
what make the heroes. These are what glorify certain 
lives that stand through history as the lights and beacons 
of mankind. The materialist, the sceptic, the coward, 
he cannot be a hero. We talk sometimes about the un- 
heroic character of modern life. We say that there can 
be no heroes nowadays. We point to our luxurious 
living for the reason. But oh, my friends, it is not in 
your silks and satins, not in your costly houses and 
your sumptuous tables, tliat your unheroic lives consist. 
It is in the absence of great inspiring ideas, of generous 
enthusiasms, and of the courage of self-forgetfulness. It 



174 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS, 

may be that you must throw away your comfortable 
living to get these things ; but your lack of heroism is 
not in your comfortable living, but in the absence of 
these things. Do not blame a mere accident for that 
which lies so much deeper. There are moments when 
you bear your sorrows, when you watch by your dying, 
when you bury your dead, when you are anxiously 
teaching your children, when you resist a great tempta- 
tion, when your faith or your country is in danger; 
there are such moments with you all when you seize 
the idea of human living and are made generous and 
brave because of it. Then, for all your modern dress, 
for all your modern parlor where you stand, you are 
heroic like David, like Paul, like any of God's knights 
in any of the ages which are most remote and pictu- 
resque. Then you catch some glimpse of a region into 
which you might enter, and where, with no blast of 
trumpets or waving of banners, you might be heroic all 
the time. 

And now we may turn to that which has been our 
purpose in all we have been saying. What we have 
had in our mind is the great work of foreign mis- 
sions, and we have been led to speak of heroism in its 
three fold quality of ideality and magnanimity and bra- 
very. Now no cause ever really takes possession of the 
world unless it puts on the heroic aspect, unless it shows 
itself capable of inspiring heroism. Christianity is sub- 
ject to this law like every other cause. It, too, must show 
itself heroic or it fails to seize and hold mankind ; and 
it is in the desire for universal extension, the desire to 
make its Master known to all men, the desire for foreign 
missions, that Christianity asserts her heroism. 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 175 

It is true indeed that Christianity is itself heroic 
life. All that there is in human living becomes magni- 
fied and glorified to its best when it is put under the 
leadership of Christ. The deepest idea of life is brought 
out and proclaimed ; the true generosity of life is uttered ; 
its selfishness is broken up ; and love, which is the power 
of the Christian life, casts out fear and makes the ser- 
vant of the Savior brave. The Christian is the heroic 
man. Ah ! as I say that, does there float across your 
mind the memory of many and many a time in history, 
or in the life that you have watched, or in your own life 
which you have lived, my Christian friends, when the 
Christian has not been the hero; when, even in the 
name of Christ, the Christianity which called Him its 
Master has seemed to forsake ideas and to give itself 
over to machineries, seemed to make life dwindle into a 
little system of economies for securing to privileged souls 
freedom from pain and a share in hixuries here and 
hereafter, seemed to make men cowardly instead of 
brave ? I know it ! I know it ! Such things have been ; 
such things have been and they still are, in the name of 
Christ. But such things are not Christianity. Look at 
Christ ! The idealist, the generous, the brave ! Anything 
that is mechanical, that is selfish, that is cowardly, coming 
into His religion, comes as an intruder and an enemy. 
Christianity in its essence is, Christianity in its long 
and general influence always has been, heroic; the 
power of ideality and magnanimity and bravery among 
men. 

But if Christianity is heroic life, the missionary work 
is heroic Christianity. By this time I am sure that I 
have made it clear that if that is true at all it is true 



176 THE HEEOISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

not from any mere circumstances of personal privation 
which attach to the missionary life, but because the mis- 
sionary life has most closely seized and most tenaciously 
holds and lives by the essential central life-idea 'of 
Christianity. What is that idea ? Out of all the com- 
plicated mass of Christian thought and faith, is there any 
one conception which we can select and say, " That is 
the idea of Christianity " ? Certainly there is. What 
is it ? That man is the child of God. That, beyond all 
doubt, is the idea of Christianity. Everything issues 
from, everything returns to, that. Man's first happiness, 
man's fallen life, man's endless struggle, man's quenchless 
hope, — they are all bound up and find their explana- 
tion in the truth that man was, and has never ceased to 
be, and is, the child of God. Therein lies the secret of 
the incarnation, all the appeal of the Savior's life, all 
the power of the Savior's death. It is the Son of God 
bringing back the children to their Father. Now we 
believe that, we love it, we live by it, all of us in all 
our Christian life. But when a man gathers up his life 
and goes out simply to spend it all in telling the chil- 
dren of God who never heard it from any other lips 
than his that their Father is their Father ; when all that 
he has known of Christ is simply turned into so much 
force by which the tidings of their sonship is to be 
driven home to hearts that do not easily receive so vast 
a truth ; to that man certainly the idea has become a 
master and a king, as it has not to us. Belief is power. 
By the quantity of power I may know the quantity of 
belief. He is the true idealist, not who possesses ideas, 
but whom ideas possess ; not the man whose life wears 
its ideas as ornamental jewels, but the man whose ideas 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 177 

shape his life like plastic clay. And so the true Chris- 
tian idealist is he whose conception of man as the re- 
deemed child of God has taken all his life and moulded 
it in new shapes, planted it in new places, so filled and 
inspired it that, like the Spirit of God in Elijah, it has 
taken it up and carried it where it never would have 
chosen to go of its own lower will. 

Here lies, I think, the real truth about the relation 
which the missionary life has to the surrenders and pri- 
vations and hardships which it has to undergo. The 
missionary does give up his home and all the circum- 
stances of cultivated comfortable life, and goes out across 
the seas, among the savages to tell them of the great 
Christian truth, to carry them the gospel. I am sure 
that often a great deal too much has been made of the 
missionary's surrenders, as if they were something al- 
most inconceivable, as if they in themselves constituted 
some vague sort of claim upon the respect and even the 
support of other men. But we are constantly reminded 
that that is not so. The missionaries themselves, from 
St. Paul down, have never claimed mere pity for their 
sacrifices. It is other people, it is the speakers in mis- 
sionary meetings, who have claimed it for them. Tlie 
sacrifices of the missionary every year are growing less 
and less. As civilkation and quick communication 
press the globe ever smaller, and make life on the banks 
of the Ganges much the same tliat it is on the banks of 
the Charles, the sacrifices of the missionary life grow 
more and more slight. And ahvays there is the fact, 
which people are always ready to point out, that other 
men do every day for gain or pleasure just what the 
missionary does for the gospel, and nobody wonders. 

12 



178 THi; HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

The merchant leaves his home and goes and lives in 
China to make money. The young man dares the sea 
and explores the depths of Africa or the jungles of the 
islands for scientific discovery or for pure adventure. 
"What is the missionary more than these ? What do you 
say to me about his sacrifices ? Only this, I think, that 
the fact that he is ready to do the same things — not 
greater, if you please, but the same things — for the 
Christian idea, which other men will do for money or 
for discovery or for adventure, is a great proof of the 
power of that idea. It takes at once what some people 
call a vague sentiment, and co-ordinates it as a working 
force with the mightiest powers the world knows ; for 
there are none stronger than these, money, discovery, 
and adventure. And since men are to be judged not 
merely by the way in which they submit themselves to 
forces but by the quality of the forces to which they 
submit, not merely by their obediences but by their 
masters, not merely by their enthusiasms but by the 
subjects about which they are enthusiastic; it certainly 
is a different sort of claim to our respect when a man 
dares any kind of sacrifice for Christ and His gospel of 
man's divine sonship, from that which comes when a 
man dares just the same sacrifices for himself, or for his 
family which is but his extended self. Here is the 
true value to give to the often told and ever touching 
story of the missionary's sufferings. I resent it as an 
insult to him if I am asked to pity him because, going 
to preach the gospel of the Savior, he very often has to 
sleep out-doors and walk till he is footsore, and stand 
where men jeer at him and taunt him. But I rejoice 
in that story of suffering because I can see through it 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 179 

the clear strong power of his faith in that gospel for 
which he undertook it all. The suffering is valueless 
save for the motive which shines through it. The 
world is right when, seeing Paul and a whole shipload 
of other people wrecked upon the coast of Malta, it has 
wholly forgotten or never cared who the other people 
were, but has seized the shipwrecked Paul and set 
him among the heroes. It was not the shipwreck but 
the idea that shone through the shipwreck, that made 
his heroism. He was a martyr, a witness. The roar 
of the breakers and the crash of the ship were but the 
emphasis. The essential force and meaning was in the 
great apostle's faith. The poor wretches who suffered 
with him were on their own selfish errands, and the 
shipwreck could give no real dignity or beauty to what 
was not in itself dignified or beautiful. 

It seems as if I need not take the time to show 
that with the supreme ideal character of the mission- 
ary's life there must go a supreme magnanimity and 
bravery. 

Look at the point of magnanimity. No man can be 
magnanimous who does not live by ideas. But the 
higher and the more enthusiastic the ideas, the more 
complete will be the magnanimity they bring. Now 
the missionary idea that man is God's child gives birth 
to two enthusiasms; one for the Father, one for the 
child ; one for God, one for man. The two blend to- 
gether without any interference, and both together 
drown the missionary's self-remembrance, with all its 
littleness and jealousy. Who can tell, as the mission- 
ary stands there preaching the salvation to his dusky 
congregation, which fire burns the warmest in his heart ? 



180 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

Is it the love for God or for his brethren ? Is it the 
Master who died for him, or these men for whom also 
He died, from whom his strongest inspiration comes ? 
No one can tell. He cannot tell himself The Lord 
Himself in His own parable foretold the noble, sweet, 
inextricable confusion. " Inasmuch as ye have done it 
unto one of these ye have done it unto Me." But surely 
in the blended power of the two enthusiasms there is 
the strongest power of magnanimity. All that the 
mystic feels of personal love of God, all that the 
philanthropist knows of love for man, these two, each 
purifying and deepening and heightening the other, 
unite in the soul of liim who goes to tell the men 
whom he loves as his brethren, about God whom he 
loves as his Father. 

Of the courage of the missionary life I have already 
spoken. Its singularity and supremacy are not in the 
way in which the missionary dares physical danger ; 
other men do that. It is not in his cheerful bearing of 
men's dislike and scorn. That we all know is too easy 
for us to wonder at it when a man is really possessed by 
a great idea. The real courage of the missionary is in the 
mixture of mental and moral daring with which he 
faces his great idea itself. A man dares to believe, in 
spite of all discouragement, in spite of all the brutish- 
ness and hateful life of men, in spite of retarded civili- 
zation and continual outbreaks of the power of evil, that 
man is still the child of God, and that the way is wide 
open for every man to come to his Father, and that the 
Christ who has redeemed us to the Father must ulti- 
mately claim the whole world for His own. That is the 
bravest thing a reasonable man can do, to thoroughly 



THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 181 

believe that and to take one's whole life and consecrate 
it to that truth. A man may no doubt do it heedlessly 
and thoughtlessly, just as a man may walk up to a can- 
non s mouth singing light songs, but when a man does 
it with patient, calm, earnest thoughtfulness, it is the 
bravest thing a man can do. To face a great idea and, 
owning its mastery, to put our hands into its hands, 
saying, " Lead where you w^ill and I will go with you ;" 
that is always a more courageous thing than 'it is to 
fight with giants or to bear pain. 

I have pleaded with you this morning for the heroism 
of the missionary life. Not because of the pains it suf- 
fers but because of the essential character it bears it is 
heroic. Pain is the aureole but not the sainthood. So 
they have marched of old, the missionaries of all the 
ages of the religion of the Incarnation and the Cross, 
idealists, believers, magnanimous and brave, the heroes 
of our faith. They were all this because they were mis- 
sionaries. They could not have been missionaries and 
not have been all this. You cannot picture mere ma- 
chines or disbelievers or selfish men or cowards doing 
what they have done. They have lived in the midst of 
infinite thoughts and yet not grown vague. They have 
worked with the tools- of human life, but not grown 
petty. In one word, they have been heroes because of 
their faith, because their souls supremely believed in and 
their lives were supremely given to Christ. 

If, as I believe with all my heart, the world's fullest 
faith in Christ is yet to come ; if, as I think, we are 
just coming now to a simpler and deeper Christianity 
than the world has ever known, who shall not dare to 



182 THE HEROISM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 

hope that the missionary life, the heroism of Christi- 
anity, the heroisni of the heroism of human life is not 
dead, but is just upon the point of opening its true 
glory and living with a power that it has never shown 
before ? 

Let us have some such faith to-day. It is a little 
heroic even to believe in foreign missions. If we may 
not be among the heroes, let us, like the church of old, 
hear the' Holy Ghost and go with Paul and Barnabas 
down to their ship and lay our hands on them and send 
them away with all our sympathy and blessing. So, 
perhaps, we can catch something of their heroism. So, 
in our quiet and home-keeping Christian lives, the idea 
of Christianity may become more clear, Christ our Lord 
more dear, and we ourselves be made more faithful, 
more generous, and more brave. 



XL 

THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

**So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of 
liberty." — James ii. 12. 

"The law of liberty'- is the striking expression of 
this verse, the one that provokes our curiosity. 

Of all the qualities which great books and especially 
the Bible have, few are more remarkable than their 
power of bringing out the unity of disassociated and 
apparently contradictory ideas. One of the peculiari- 
ties of their use of common words is the way in which 
they take two which seem directly opposite and, carry- 
ing each out into its highest meaning, find for them a 
meeting-place in some larger truth. It gives us a 
glimpse of the final unity of all truth. We live down 
about the bases of the words we use ; see them in their 
simply human relations ; see them where they touch the 
ground. To us they seem to stand opposite, over 
against each other, ununited, ununitable. But we never 
must forget that every true thought outgoes its human 
relations, and for all true thoughts there must be some 
place of meeting. Inspiration is just the entrance of 
their complete meaning into human words ; and then, 
filled with God, they are illuminated, and we can trace 
them all the way up and see that they are not isolated 
columns, but parts of a structure. They are not oppo- 



184 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

site and contradictory, but they meet together in an 
arch of one harmonious meaning. And then all lan- 
guage builds itself from being a wilderness of uncon- 
nected pillars, — about which we wander as an insect 
creeps from pillar to pillar across a vast cathedral floor, 
having no suspicion of its unity, — into one vast temple 
wherein intelligent men walk upright, looking upward 
to where the great roof collects and harmonizes all, and 
do intelligible worship. 

Take these two words, " the law of liberty," Liberty 
and Law. They stand over against each other. Our 
first conception of them is as contradictory. The his- 
tory of human life, we say, is a history of their strug- 
gle. They are foes. Law is the restraint of liberty. 
Liberty is the abrogation, the getting rid of law. Each, 
so far as it is absolute, implies the absence of the other. 
It is a contradiction of terms to speak of them 
together. 

But the expression of our text suggests another 
thought, that by the highest standards there is no con- 
tradiction but rather a harmony and unity between the 
two ; that there is some high point in which they unite ; 
that really the highest law is liberty, the highest liberty 
is law ; that there is such a thing as a law of liberty. 
This is the thing which we are to study and try to com- 
prehend. 

In the first place then, what do we mean by Liberty, 
that oldest, dearest, vaguest of the words of man ? I 
have defined it often to you. I hold it to mean simply 
the genuine ability of a living creature to manifest its 
whole nature, to do and be itself most unrestrainedly. 
Nothing more, nothing less than that. Against aU tern- 



THE LAW OF LIBEETY. 185 

porary and conventional ideas of freedom we assert that, 
that no man is a slave whose nature has power to ex- 
press and use all of itself; that no man is free whose 
nature is restrained from such expression. 

Now between this idea and our ordinary thought of 
law there must of course be an inherent contradiction. 
The ordinary laws of social and national life are special 
provisions made for the very purpose of restricting the 
natures and characters of their subjects. JSTational law 
does not aim at the development of individual charac- 
ter, but at the preservation of great general interests by 
the repression of the characteristic tendencies of indi- 
viduals. One man has a tendency to steal. The law 
sets itself against the freedom of his nature and says 
"You shall not." Another's character tempts him to 
murder. "No!" says the law, and cramps his liberty 
of action by the grasp of positive restriction. All na- 
tional and social law, in the performance of its office, 
sets itself in struggle with the liberty of the individual, 
and binds his nature away from certain bad and harm- 
ful manifestations. And as law becomes despotic and 
supreme it goes on to restrict more and more the free- 
dom of the personal nature. A tyrannical law, which 
has slaves for its subjects, restricts not only bad but 
good tendencies. A slave says, "I mean to learn to 
read." " ISTo," says the master. " It is not good for the 
community you live in. Your individual freedom must 
yield to its requirements." And so the law shuts his book 
and takes it away. Another slave says, " I am going 
to run away ; I am my own master ; " but at once the 
law puts its fatal arm out and draws him back and 
says, " No ! It is for our good that you should stay. 



186 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

Your freedom must yield again ; " and so it relocks the 
fetters. 

Thus far, then, you see Law is the opposite of Lib- 
erty. Law between man and man, in its legitimate and 
its illegitimate aspects alike, is the law of constraint. 
It is always seen holding man back, repressing some 
tendency which, if the man were perfectly free, would 
be putting itself out to somebody's inconveniency. We 
say the word "law," and it has this repressive sound. 
We hear the noise of grating prison-doors, of heavy 
keys groaning in their locks. We see the lines of chains 
or lines of soldiers that bind the individual's freedom 
for some other individual's or for society's advantage. 
Law is constraint as yet, and is the foe of liberty. 

This is the kind of law which always comes first. 
It was the first law of the world. Just as soon as 
Adam and Eve stood there free in the garden a law 
came down and bound itself about their liberty. " Of 
the tree in the midst of the garden ye may not eat." 
This is the first law of every family. The' new life of 
the new child puts itself out into some one of its untried 
tendencies, and the mother's love, full of a supreme 
authority, draws it back, restrains it, says her first 
'' No ! " and thereby inaugurates, with her first denial, 
the struggle between liberty and law in her child's life. 
It is the law of all imperfect and immature life, the law 
of all the Old Testaments, this law of constraint, this 
law which contradicts the thought of liberty. 

Now I make use of this last illustration of the parent 
and the child to show you how this law of immature 
life, the law of constraint, being preparatory, ceases ; 
and another, the law of liberty, takes its place. We 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 187 

saw the child's liberty and the mother's law in conflict. 
The child said " I will/' and the mother said " You shall 
not/' and the mother's authority restrained the child's 
free action. Now look at the relation of those same two 
persons to each other twenty years after. Suppose 
them to have grown into that higher and more beautiful 
ideal of parental and filial life, which follows after the 
age of bare authority and submission has passed away. 
The child is a man. The mother is gray-haired. The 
boy is free, his own master. The whole idea of com- 
mand and mastery, the whole old notion of a law^ of 
constraint, has drifted away from between them. But 
is there nothing in its place? See the high dignity 
with which the son honors himself by bending to the 
mother's wish. See with what quicker instinct he has 
learned to anticipate her will. You discern the whole 
history of his education in any one act of filial love you 
see him do her. His nature has become so full, so 
impregnated with the spirit of love and obedience, that 
just as soon as it is free, its tendencies set that way. 
Its free tendencies become to it a law. Its liberty, 
with a compulsion that is irresistible, makes him her 
servant. The law of constraint which resulted from 
their relations is over. The law of liberty w^hich has 
its source in his free, moral character takes its place. 
He is obedience and so obeys. He is love, and so a 
thousand loving acts strew the calm pathway where her 
descending years must walk. 

Xow use the illustration. I do not know that I can 
state it better. The law of constraint is that which 
grows out of man's outward relations with God. The 
law of liberty is that which issues from the tendencies 



188 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

of a man's own nature inwardly filled with God. That 
is the difference. Just as soon as a man gets into such 
a condition that every freedom sets toward duty, then 
evidently he will need no law except that freedom, and 
all duty will be reached and done. 

Here then, in a moral character which both desires 
and is able to attempt the right, have v/e not reached a 
meeting point of these two contradictions ? Have we 
not gained already some conception of the meaning of a 
Law of Liberty ? I have tried to describe it simply. 
Here is a law in liberty, a liberty in law. There is no 
compulsion, and yet the life, by a tendency of its own 
educated will, sets itself towards God. The man is 
perfectly free and yet he does God's will better than 
if he were chained to do it. The two pillars have met 
and joined into the arch of a self-deciding original 
moral life. 

You see then what a fundamental and thorough thing 
this law of liberty must be. It is a law which issues 
from the qualities of a nature going thence out into 
external shape and action. It is a law of constraint 
by which you take a crooked sapling and bend it 
straight and hold it violently into line. It is a law of 
liberty by which the inner nature of the oak itself 
decrees its outward form, draws out the pattern-shape of 
every leaf, and lays the hand of an inevitable necessity 
on bark and bough and branch. All laws of constraint, 
whether in trees or men, are useless and cruel unless they 
are preparatory to, and can pass into, laws of liberty. 
My dear friends, if we understood this it would certainly 
show us the hoUowness of a great deal of the life we 
live. We yield day after day, month after month, on 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 189 

through a long series of tiresome years, to the restraints 
of morality and religion. Morality says " You must not 
steal/' and we do keep our fingers off our neighbor's 
goods. Eeligion says " You must pray to God," and 
we do say our prayers most toilsomely, morning and 
evening, summer and winter, as the years go by. It is 
of no use. It all comes to nothing unless these laws of 
constraint are passing into laws of liberty within us. 
Habits of honesty, habits of prayer, are mere bondages 
unless they are helping somehow the production of a 
free, honest, and prayerful character. The only object in 
bandaging and twisting a man's crooked leg is that some 
day it may get a free straightness into it which will 
make it keep its true shape when it is set free from ban- 
dages ; a law of liberty instead of a law of constraint. If 
that day is never coming, bandaging is mere wanton 
cruelty. Better take the bandages off and let it be 
crooked, if it is getting no inner straightness, and will 
be crooked as soon as they are removed. Now, just so, 
this discipline and education, all these commandments 
and prohibitions which God lays on us ; they are mere 
cruelty, they merely torture and worry humanity, they 
come to nothing, unless within them some free law of 
inner rectitude is growing up. One looks across God's 
gr-eat moral hospital, sees crooked souls tied up in con- 
straints, and wonders, as one might who looked through 
a surgeon's ward, behind how many of those bandages an 
inner life is gathering which some day will ask no bind- 
ing up and need nothing but its own liberty to be its 
law. It is a strange question. Suppose to-morrow all 
the laws of constraint should be repealed together; 
nothing but laws of liberty left to rule the world ; all 



190 THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

social penalties, all public restrictions lifted off to- 
gether ; nothing left but the last legislation of character. 
What would become of us ? How, just as soon as our 
bandages were off, our unshaped lives would fall into 
their shapelessness. We should see strange sights to- 
morrow morning. The man whom social decencies 
had kept honest through many well-respected years, we 
should see how the long constraint with him had been 
just an outside thing, and his law of liberty, when it 
had leave to exercise itself, was only a thief's law born 
out of a thievish heart. Strange hands would find their 
way into their neighbor's treasure. Eyes all unused to 
glow with lust, would flame out into unholy fire when 
once the quality of the inner heart had leave to utter 
itself freely. 1 tell you, my dear friends, there are very 
few of us indeed who could stand being judged by the 
law of liberty. Could you ? Would you dare, with 
the proper shame which a man feels before his fellow- 
men, would you dare to bid God lift the constraints 
away, and trust to the power of truth and love and 
holiness, to the amount of God's Spirit in your own 
heart, to carry you along His way to Him ? 

Thank God there are a few, rare lives that could 
abide the test. They come just often enough to re- 
assure our faith in human possibilities. Here and there 
a noble man, a true woman, from whom we feel sure 
that every last restraint of positive external law might 
be lifted off; and, just as it needs no hand to guide a 
sunbeam down the air, just as no heavy pressure has to 
hold down the round world into a sphere, so it would 
need nothing but the changed and perfected nature 
which is in them already to find the way and carry 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 191 

them along it, through every good, to the great final 
central good, in God. 

It is of the first importance to our understanding of 
the gospel that we should understand the difference 
between the law of constraint and the law of liberty. It 
is by the law of liberty, not by the law of constraint, 
that the gospel establishes its standards. Hence, comes 
that look of it which is the strangest to an outside spec- 
tator, the way in which it sometimes seems to depreciate 
morality and deal with spiritual and sentimental char- 
acter. Christ took His stand in the midst of a sinning 
w^orld and, leaving many a special sin unrebuked about 
Him, He just uncovered hearts with His question, " Dost 
thou believe in and love Me ? " He went, that is, back 
to character. He knew that acts could be good for 
nothing except as they grew out of character. He 
knew that there could be no morality with any relia- 
bility or permanence about it, but what carried in it the 
enactment of a free live life. On this broad basis He 
founded Christian morality, not as a new code of laws ; 
that would make Him only another Solon or another 
Numa ; but as a new life in the world, as the manifes- 
tation of a new regenerated character. That made Him 
the world's Savior, that showed Him the world's God. 

And again this doctrine of the law of liberty makes 
clear the whole order and process of Christian conver- 
sion. Laws of constraint begin conversion at the outside 
and work in. Laws of liberty begin their conversion at 
the inside and work out. Which is the true way ? If 
you are a drunkard and I want to change you by God's 
help, how shall I go to work ? I may restrain you if I 



192 THE LAW OF. LIBERTY. 

have the power, heap penalties upon you, shut up all 
the drinking sliops in town, tie you up in your room 
day after day ; I may try that way, and I try in vain. 
All temperance history has proved it. Eestrictive leg- 
islation may do something to keep sober men from 
becoming drunkards, but it can never make sober men 
out of those who are the slaves of drink already. 
No ; I must take another way. I must feel about the 
drunkard just exactly as I must about the thief, about 
the libertine, about the liar, that there is no chance of 
his special sin being reformed unless the law for its 
reformation comes oat of his own soul, the law of a free 
character there enacting the great " Thou shalt not ! " 
before which his wickedness must give way. I must 
feel sure of that ; and so I must strike right at the centre 
and, no matter what sort of a sinner he is, — drunkard 
or libertine or thief, — I must try somehow to get his 
heart open to the power of Christ, the changer of hearts. 
I must begin his reformation by trying after his con- 
version. Many men would call it, no doubt, a very 
roundabout and unpractical sort of way ; to go to preach- 
ing the gospel and talking about a change of heart to 
some poor blear-eyed inebriate who came staggering to 
you to get cured of his drunkenness. But still the fact 
remains that if that poor creature's heart can be changed ; 
and if there is anything at all in the promise of a super- 
natural regeneration nobody can doubt its possibility ; if 
his heart can be changed, not merely this sin but all 
sins must go down before the self-enacting law of the 
new life which will be in him. Other methods of re- 
form may be easier of application than this, but where 
is any one which, once applied, sweeps the whole field 
with such a perfect certainty of success ? 



I 



I 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 193 

There are, I doubt not, some among you who need 
just this radical and thorough truth. You have some one 
besetting sin. You have tried to get rid of it ; you have 
struggled with it ; you have set every law at work upon 
it ; but there it is. It is not dead. It will not die. 
You have brought it up here to-night, and while I speak 
you are feeling how live it is all the time, that untruth- 
fulness, that impurity, that selfishness, which no law 
of constraint has yet sufficed to kill. What you need 
is just the law of liberty ; the law that comes freely 
out of a changed heart. You must be converted by 
God's Spirit before you can conquer down to the root 
that sin of yours. I do not offer you to-night another 
specific for its cure. I only spread before you the great 
offer of Christ, wherein he promises to save our souls 
and make them healthy, so that out of them nothing but 
healthy fruits can grow. " Whosoever will, let him come 
and drink of the water of life freely." 

Again, this truth throws very striking light into one 
of the verses which precede our text, one of the hardest 
verses in the Bible to a great many people. " Whoso- 
ever shall keep the wdiole law", and yet offend in one 
point, is guilty of all," it is said. Why? Because the 
consistent, habitual breakage of one point proves that 
the others were kept under the law of constraint, not 
under the law of liberty. It proves that the tendency 
of the nature's liberty, which breaks forth in this one 
place, is a bad tendency and not a good one ; that if 
the nature had its way, if all constraint was removed 
and it simply acted itself out, the nine points of obe- 
dience would be less powerful than the one point of 
disobedience. It takes only one volcano anywhere in 

13 



194 THE LAW OF LIBEETY. 

the earth to show that the heart of the earth is fire, 
and that some day it may burst through the thickest 
crust. It takes only one little quiver of flame, just 
leaking out between the shingles of a house, to prove 
that the heart of the house is afire, and that no part 
of all its safe-looking walls is genuinely secure. You 
see the flame along the shingles, and you speak of it 
as a whole ; " The house is afire ! There is fire in the 
house ! " Just so you see the bad fiery nature which 
the law constrains breaking through, and again you 
speak of it as a whole. What particular shingle is 
burning is of no consequence. "The law is broken. 
The one whole law is broken by the one whole bad 
heart ! The man has sinned ; he is sin ; his law of 
liberty is a law of wickedness." This is the tragedy of 
our single sins, dear friends ; the tragedy of a fire that 
runs along the outline of the structure and, little as it 
is, proves that the whole is in danger ; the tragedy of 
one break in the earth's crust down which we read the 
fearful possibility of the last great catastrophe. Down 
the crack which some one transgression makes in the 
fair face of a smooth and blooming life, we can see 
waiting for God's judgment-word, the fire before which 
that life shall be at last consumed with fervent heat. 

The whole truth of the law of liberty starts with the 
truth that goodness is just as controlling and supreme a 
power as badness. Virtue is as despotic over the life 
she really sways as vice can be over her miserable sub- 
jects. Here is where we make our mistake. We see the 
great dark form of viciousness holding her slaves down at 
their work, wearing their life away with the unceasing 
labor of iniquity ; but I should not know how to believe 



THE LAW or LIBERTY. 195 

in anything if I did not think that there was a force in 
liberty to make men work as they can never work 
in slavery. You take a state that has been dependent 
and make it suddenly independent, free it from all the 
old obligations and tributes, and just let it be at liberty 
to develop its own self-reliant life. Does it stop work- 
ing and settle back into barbarism ? Does not the 
new , liberty prove to it a new law ? Does not inspira- 
tion come splendidly out of its independence, and the 
whole state lift itself up and answer the demands of 
its freedom with a before untried capacity of work ? 

So of the man as well as of the state. You take any 
slave to whom his liberty has been given. What is 
the result ? Does he just sit down counting his liberty 
a mere liberty to do nothing, and, with hands folded 
before him, fall even far back beyond the listless labor 
of his slavehood's days ? Ask the men who have been 
among the emancipated slaves. Sometimes, at first, 
they tell us such is the case ; but almost always, when 
the truth of liberty gets in and settles on the poor dark 
brain, when the poor chattel really gets to know and 
believe that he is his own man, there comes forth from the 
new liberty a new law. There is a compulsion about 
the needs of his novel life which drives him harder and 
gets more work out of him than his master's frown or 
whip had ever used to do. He studies or digs or fights 
under the inner impulse of a new-found manhood, which 
is his law of liberty. 

Now that is an illustration. It represents the incen- 
tive power of all freedom. There is one large presenta- 
tion of thB fact of sin which always speaks of it as a 
bondage, a constraint, and conseq^uently of holiness as 



196 THE LAW OF LIBEKTY. 

freedom or liberation. '' The bondage of sin and death." 
" The perfect liberty of the children of God." Those 
are the two terms. N'ow if our illustration includes a 
truth, it must be with every bondman just as with the 
black slave of the South, that his liberty will be a 
larger and more imperative compulsion to him than his 
slavery can be. This is what I want to believe. When 
I see a man toiling in some one of the slaveries of sin, I 
want to think : " Yes, he is working hard, but not half as 
hard as he would if he were free, and set on by an inner 
love to labor for the cause of holiness." I want to hold 
that in the nature of things right has a supreme control 
over its servants which the wrong can never win over its 
slaves. And I do hold it. I believe I see it. I be- 
lieve there is no more splendidly despotic power any- 
where than that with which the new life in a man sets 
him inevitably to do righteous and godly things. If 
there is one thing on earth which is certain, which is 
past all doubt, past all the power of mortal hinderance 
or perversion, it is the assurance with which the good 
man goes into goodness and does good things, ruled by 
the liberty of his higher life. 

The law of liberty ! This is its manifestation. This 
is the picture of its meaning, this character of the 
regenerated man. Free, yet a servant ! Free from ex- 
ternal compulsions, free from sin ; yet a servant to the 
higher law that issues forever from the God within him. 
In him is realized that high conception of the Collect 
in our morning service, which you and I utter Sunday 
after Sunday, and which he lives on from day to day. 
" God, whose service is perfect freedom." He never 
says to himself '' I must" God never speaks to him 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 197 

" Thou shalt ; '' but straight across every temptation and 
expediency, across the prejudices of his own education 
and the perplexing standards of the world, across every 
social or national intimidation, he goes to do the thing 
he knows is right. He thinks right, and speaks right, 
and acts right, simply because he is right and is com- 
pelled to it by the liberty of his new nature. Liberty 
is a positive thing, not merely negative ; it works and 
lives and struggles and is driven by a queenly compul- 
sion to everything that is good. 

for such a liberty in us ! Look at Christ and see it 
in perfection. His was the freest life man ever lived. 
Nothing could bind Him. He walked across old Jewish 
traditions and they snapped like cobwebs. He acted 
out the divinity that was in Him up to the noblest ideal 
of liberty. But was there no compulsion in His work- 
ing ? Hear Him : " I must be about my Father's busi- 
ness." Was it no compulsion that drove Him those 
endless journeys, footsore and heartsore, through His un- 
grateful land ? "I must work to-day." What slave of 
sin was ever driven to his wickedness as Christ was to 
holiness ? What force ever drove a selfish man into his 
voluptuous indulgence with half the irresistibility that 
forced the Savior to the cross ? my dear friends, who 
does not dream for himself of a freedom as complete and 
as inspiring as the Lord's ? Who does not pray that he 
too may be ruled by such a sweet despotic law of lib- 
erty ? 

By this law we shall be judged. How simple and 
sublime it makes the judgment day ! We stand before 
the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch 



198, THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 

the closed lips of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts 
stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce our 
"fate; heaven or hell. The lips do not open. The 
Judge just lifts His hand and raises from each soul be- 
fore Him every law of constraint whose pressure has 
been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint and 
their results are manifest. The real intrinsic nature of 
each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's law of lib- 
erty becomes supreme. And each soul, without one 
word of condemnation or approval, by its own inner 
tendency, seeks its own place. They turn and separate, 
father from child, brother from brother, wife from hus- 
band, each with the old habitual restrictions lifted off, 
turns to its own ; one by an inner power to the right 
hand, another by a like power to the left ; these up to 
heaven, and these down to hell. Do we need more ? 
It needs no word, no smile, no frown. The freeing 
of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated nature 
dictates its own destiny. Could there be a more solemn 
judgment seat ? Is it not a fearful thing to be ''judged 
by the law of liberty " ? 

" So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged 
by the law of liberty." Is this James, then, what fool- 
ish readers of the Bible call him, a shallow moralist and 
formalist ? Is Paul or John more profound ? How 
must they speak and do who live in sight of such a 
judgment? "With what continual searching of their 
hearts ! How solemnly they must speak ! How sol- 
emnly they must do ! What a deep reverence and awe 
and independence must be in them 1 How real the 
things of the soul, the things of right and wrong, the 
things of spiritual life, must be ! Above all, how they 



I 



THE LAW OF LIBERTY. 199 

must wrestle and pray to win from God that gift of the 
regenerating Spirit which can change their hearts down 
to the core ; make them, like Christ's heart, the spon- 
taneous source of every holiness ; make their law of 
liberty a law of everlasting life ! 



XIL 

FASTING. 

A SERMON FOR LENT. 

** Moreover when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites of a sad counte- 
nance. . . . That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto tKy 
Father which is in secret." — Matt. vi. 16, 18. 

The character of the time and place in which the 
earthly life of Christ our Lord was lived, has certainly 
had much to do in shaping the whole growth of Chris- 
tianity. It was necessary that the incarnation should 
stand at one special point in history and at one particu- 
lar spot upon the earth. That period and spot must 
have been chosen by Him who sent His Son to be the 
Savior. And one consequence has been that the vices 
and errors which peculiarly characterized the country of 
Judea eighteen hundred years ago stand forever most 
emphatically denounced, and their opposite virtues and 
truths most enthusiastically praised, by the Master of 
the Christian faith. 

Among other things which had gone sadly wrong in 
His time, there was what we may call the bodily treat- 
ment of the spiritual life, the treatment of the spiritual 
life through the body in which it is enshrined. And so 
Jesus is especially drawn to declare what the true 
method of that treatment is. It shows us how natu- 
rally the evils which He encountered spring out of hu- 
man nature, when we see that not even the clearness of 



FASTING. 201 

Christ's teaching upon the subject has prevented the 
Christian world from dropping back into the same evils 
over and over again. That there is such a bodily treat- 
ment of the soul's life is clear enough. Hardly any- 
thing can happen to our bodies that does not send some 
influence in to the most spiritual part of us. The con- 
dition of the body tells immediately on the condition of 
its inmate. And immediately the question comes, — the 
question which has always come to those who cared ear- 
nestly for their soul's life, — since everything that hap- 
pens to the body tells upon the soul, may we not treat 
the body so as to help the soul ? That idea runs 
through the whole of man's religious history. It in- 
spires alike the monk flogging himself in his lonely 
cell, and the fresh young English believer in muscular 
Christianity. Out of that idea sprang the whole theory 
and practice of fasting, or the denial of any of the appe- 
tites of the body, with a view to the training of the cor- 
responding appetites of the soul. That is what fasting 
means. It is not mere abstinence from food or from 
any other pleasure, in itself. It is abstinence with a 
purpose. This idea of the soul in, and capable of being 
treated through, the body, w^as essential to it. Now, 
when Jesus came to those Jews He found the practice 
still prevailing, but its purpose had passed out of it. * It 
was an honorable, almost a required thing, to practise 
certain abstinences ; but that care for the soul's life, out 
of which the habit of abstinence had sprung, was gone. 
Christ's whole endeavor, for the Jews and for the gen- 
erations who, to His sight, stood crowding behind the 
Jews, was to bring the purpose back into the practice. 
A purpose is to every practice what an inhabitant is to 



202 FASTING. 

a house. A house can stand with no inhabitant, but it 
soon becomes rotten and goes to decay. You can tell 
in a day when a tenant has moved into a house which 
has stood unoccupied. The house puts on at once the 
look of life. Its breaks and ruins are repaired. It is 
renewed and preserved by its new occupancy. So a 
practice may stand after its purpose is dead, but it is 
weak and soon grows rotten and decays. But if you 
can bring its purpose back into it again, it assumes 
once more the look of life. Its broken walls are re- 
built, its windows mended, and its gates repaired. 
Many men attempt to keep up a body of good habits 
without any spiritual purpose of goodness to inhabit 
them. It is as anxious and costly and hopeless an un- 
dertaking as would be the attempt to keep in repair a 
whole village of unoccupied houses. But put the pur- 
pose into the practice and let it live there, and it is 
strange how the practice takes care of its own repairs 
and is always sound and whole. 

Lent begins this week, and the idea of Lent is spirit- 
ual culture, and always, as a part of that idea, there has 
been associated with Lent the thought of abstinence. 
We are looking forward to a soberer and quieter life, 
a life which in some form or other is to fast from some 
of its indulgences. And the old danger comes up with 
the old duty, the danger lest the fasting should become 
to us as dead a thino- as it was to those Jews. To »'uard 
against tliat danger, ought we not to try to put its highest ; 
purpose into this practice to which we annually return ? ; 
Is it not well that on this Sunday before Lent we should 
try to see what God designs by those Lents, those periods 
of sobered life and abstinence from outward pleasures. 



FASTING. 203 

which both in His word and in the intimations of our 
own nature have His sanction and authority ? 

God has a reason for everything. Our best religious 
progress consists in large part of this, the coming by 
sympathy with Him to see the reasons of what have 
been to us bare commandments. The change from the 
arbitrary to the essential look in what God does is the 
richest and most delightful feature of the spiritual 
growth. God says that He will punish the wicked. I 
bow submissive, but am puzzled and depressed. He 
says so, and it must be right. But by and by I come to 
know that He must punish the wicked, that the wicked 
man punishes himself, and all is changed. The puzzle, 
the bewilderment, is gone. God says, " Love me and you 
shall prosper." It sounds like an arbitrary reward given 
to His own favorites ; but we go on to see that to love 
Him is prosperity, and then the heart rests satisfied. 
So God says, " Curb and deny the body, and the soul shall 
thrive." Gradually again we come to see that this too 
is essential and not arbitrary, and to trace the principles 
under which physical mortification ministers to spiritual 
life. One of the greatest joys of heaven must forever 
be this deepening and deepening sight of the essential 
behind what seemed arbitrary in the ways of God. 

Let us ask what is the use of fasting, for so we shall 
best come to understand the true methods and degrees of 
fasting. And let us begin with this. All bodily disci- 
phne, all voluntary abstinence from pleasure of whatever 
sort, must be of value either as a symbol of something 
or as a means of something. These two functions be- 
long to it as being connected with the body, which is at 
once the utterer and the educator of the soul within. 



204 . FASTING. 

Just suppose any great mental or moral change to come 
in a man's life. We will not speak of the great funda- 
mental religious change of a man's conversion ; but any 
change from frivolity to earnestness, from lightness to 
seriousness of life. He who has been careless, free, and 
irresponsible, taking life as it came, with no reality, no 
sense of duty, undertakes a different way of living, be- 
gins to study, begins to work, seeks knowledge, accepts 
obligations. Tlie old life fades away and a new life 
begins. Self-indulgence is put aside. Self-devotion 
takes its place. This is a spiritual, an inward change. 
It is independent of outward circumstances. A man 
conceivably may live this new life, and everything ex- 
ternal be still the same that it has always been. But 
practically this more earnest inward life suits the outer 
life to itself. Quickly or gradually the man who has 
begun to live more seriously within, begins to live more 
simply without. He comes instinctively to less gor- 
geous dresses and barer walls and slighter feasts. The 
outer life is restrained and simplified. And this re- 
straint and simplicity is at once a symbol or expression 
of the changed inner life, and a means for its cultiva- 
tion. If the change is one w^hich involves repentance 
and self-reproach, the giving up of a life which never 
ought to have been lived at all for one that always has 
been a duty, then both of these offices of the outward 
self-denial become plainer. The stripping of the old 
luxury off from the life is at once an utterance of hum- 
ble regret for a wrong past, and also an opening of the 
soul to new and better influences. It is as when an 
effeminate reveller at a banquet is suddenly summoned 
to a battle where he ouoiit to be in the front rank. As 



FASTING. 

he springs up from the couch in self-reproau. 
ing away of his garlands and his robes means, iii\. .. : 
shame at having been idle and feasting when he ougnu 
to have been at work ; and second, his eagerness to have 
his limbs free so that the work which he has now un- 
dertaken may be well done. His stripping off of his 
wanton luxuries is at once a symbol of his self-reproach 
for the past, and a means of readiness for the new work 
that awaits him. And that is the meaning of all vol- 
untary mortification which has any meaning. You go 
to a monk in his cell, and say : '' What brings you here ? 
Why do you choose these bare walls, this hard bed, this 
meagre fare ? " If he understands himself at all, and 
has any real right to be there in the cloister, his answer 
is : "I love them for two reasons. They are the sym- 
bols of my repentance for my sin. They suit this soul 
of mine, stripped bare of all its pride, and prostrate in 
humility. And then, besides, they help this new life of 
communion with my Lord. Through their blank empti- 
ness the highest influences may come in to me. My 
soul is not muffled and hidden from the voice and touch 
of God/' Both as a symbol of repentance and as a means 
of education he loves his dreary cell. 

Now to take one step more, if what this monk's ex- 
perience is made of must, in some form or other, come in 
the life of every growing spiritual man ; if in every spir- 
itual advance there must be a stripping off of pride and 
an opening of the nature by some new doors to some new 
power; then, in healthier and more human forms no 
doubt, but still the same essentially, there must be in 
every aspiring life the same symbol and the same means 
which he has in his cell. No man can be a better man 



206 FASTING. 

save as his pride is crushed into repentance ; and as the 
swathing, enwrapping mass of passions and indulgences 
that is around him is broken tlirough, so that God can 
find his soul and pour Himself into it. There is no 
other way. You want to be a better man. Perhaps 
you cannot remember that you ever wanted it before. 
You have gone on, self-satisfied and self-indulgent. But 
at last this new wish has come to you. Now, what have 
you to do ? Any merest tyro in the spiritual experience 
may tell. You have got to break your pride all to 
pieces with repentance ; and you have got to say to these 
crowding passions of yours : " Stand aside. Leave my 
soul open, that it and God, it and duty, may come to- 
gether." Pride and passion must be conquered. That 
is an inward struggle. But it reaches the outward life, 
and in the voluntary surrender of that in which the 
pride has gloried and on which the passions have fed 
there is the symbol of the humiliation and the means of 
the new life of the souLC Yes, the monk was all wrong 
wh'fen he thought that there was merit in his lonely life, 
all wrong when he forgot or despised the rich teachings 
and helps of God which come through bounty and not 
through poverty, all wrong when, trying to diet his soul, 
he starved it ; but let not our brighter religion, our joy 
in all of God's good things, make us forget wherein the 
monk was right, in his earnest fight with pride and pas- 
sion, and in his earnest desire to make the circumstances , 
of his outward life his ally and not his adversary in that j 
fight. That is the redeeming glory which often illumi- 
nates the inhuman brutality of his life, and makes his 
cell-walls glow with heroism.i 

This, then, is the philosophy of fasting. It expresses | 



FASTING. 

repentance, and it uncovers the life to 
down, my pride ; stand back my passions ; 
wicked, and I wait for God to bless me/' That is . 
the fasting man says. You see wdiat I mean by fasting. 
It is the voluntary disuse of anything innocent in itself, 
with a view to spiritual culture. It does not apply to 
food alone. It applies to everything which a man may 
desire. A man may fast from costliness of dress, from 
sumptuous houses, from exhilarating company, from 
music, from art, considered as sensuous delights. There 
are times when some deep experience, some profound 
humility of repentance, rejects them all. jSTot they 
but their opposites become the soul's true utterance. 
In its sorrow for its sins, all sumptuousness jars upon it. 
The feast and the feast's music are out of place. By 
emptiness and not by fulness that self-contempt, that 
sense of the vanity of the spirit's search to find goodness 
in itself, must be expressed. 

Now^ let us dwell upon these two in order. Let us 
think first about this first value of fasting as a symbol. 
It expresses the abandonment of pride. But it is the 
characteristic of a symbolic action that it not merely ex- 
presses but increases and nourishes the feeling to which 
it corresponds. Laughter is the symbol of joy, but as 
you laugh your laughter reacts upon the joy and 
heightens it. Tears are the sign of sorrow, but they 
feed themselves the sorrow out of which they flow. 
Cheers are the expression of enthusiasm, but as the 
crowd sends up its shouts its zeal deepens and glows 
the bric^hter. And so if abstinence is the sio-n of hu- 
mility, it is natural enough that as the life abstains 
from its ordinary indulgences, the humiliation which is 



lASTING. 

..iiould be deepened by its expression, 
oymbol becomes also a means. I know the 
■ ,^;.i'S to which this idea may lead. I know and I 
^read as much as anybody that reversal of the true rela- 
tion which begins the creation of feeling at the outside, 
and tries to make the heart beat by mere moving of the 
arms and opening of the dead lips. But with all its 
possible misapplications it is a true principle still. The 
utterance of an eniotion increases that emotion. The 
heart once beating, the outward exercise makes it beat 
the more truly. And so it is no artificial thing, nothing 
unreal or unnatural, when the soul, sorry for its sins, 
ashamed *of its poor bad life, lets its shame utter itself 
in signs of humiliation, and finds in quick and sure 
reaction the shame which it expresses deepened and 
strengthened through the utterance which expresses it. 
Take it all to yourself Suppose that something some 
day makes that real to you, which you know so well 
now, that your life, made for a more than angelic purity, 
is all blotted and stained with sin. Suppose that some 
day that awful contrast faces you which changes a man's 
whole thought of himself You see yourself and you 
see God. Your sin stands out against His holiness ; 
your darkness against His perfection. On such a day 
as that, humbled and broken, tell me, what will your 
outward life be ? Do you think there will grow up in 
you no repugnance to your easy luxuriousness ? Will 
it seem well and fitting that an inner life so bruised 
and shamed should be carried about in a body pampered 
and decorated, where men are crowding, where lamps 
are shining, where all is gay and has no touch of any- 
thing but pleasure ? Something so different from that. 



FASTING. 

That mortified, bewildered inner life will cic 
bol. Solitude, silence, soberness, plainness t>.^ 
meagreness, will seem the true expression of its ii 
experience. And then from that expression of it there 
will come back new vividness and depth into the experi- 
ence itself; and the soul will gather a new humility out 
of the circumstances of humiliation which it has already- 
gathered about itself. That is the constant reaction 
between the outer and the inner conditions. That is 
what all representative dress and habits mean. The 
nun's quietude, the priest's purity, the mourner's sor- 
row, tlie bride's joy, the soldier's glory, — all are first 
uttered and then deepened by the garments in which 
they are severally clothed. First you give the emotion 
its true symbol and then the symbol in its turn gives 
new strength back to the emotion. 

And if then it be good to consecrate some special 
weeks to the especial recognition of the experience, it is 
surely good likewise to put the expressive and educating 
symbol into those wrecks too. Lent is consecrated to 
self-knowledge, to the humbling of pride, and so to that 
fasting, that abstinence and soberness of life, by which 
the soul's humility is first expressed and then increased. 

And then let us pass to the second value of fasting, 
its value directly as a means. The more we watch the 
lives of men, the more we see that one of the reasons 
why men are not occupied with great thoughts and in- 
terests is the w^ay in w^hich their lives are overfilled w^*'' 
little things. It is not that you deliberately 
thought and study and benevolence. It is 
you are so busy with amusement and 
ness that you are living such an i^ 

1^ 



210 FASTING. 

not that you hate your soul that you never talk with it. 
It is that your body lies so close to you that it occupies 
all your thought. It is not that you despise the highest 
hopes and interests of your immortal nature that you 
neglect them so. It is mainly that your passions crowd 
so thick about you that you are entirely occupied with 
them. It is no untrue picture of the lives of many of 
us if we imagine ourselves, that is, our wills, standing 
in the centre ; and close about each central figure, about 
each man's self, a crowd of clamorous passions and eager 
lusts ; while away outside of them there wait in larger 
circle the higher claimants of our time and powers, 
culture and truth and charity and religion, with all their 
train. This self stands in the centre listening to the m 
passions which crowd up so thick about it ; worried 
and restless all the time because, though it cannot see 
them, it is always conscious of that outer circle of more 
worthy applicants. It hears their strong remonstrance 
with the passions which are shutting them out from the 
soul that belongs to them. It promises itself the time 
when all these lower claimants shall have been satisfied, 
and shall give way and let into their places those who 
are more worthy than themselves. That time does not 
come. The passions crowd and clamor as noisily as 
ever. What ought to come to pass is that those crowd- 
ing passions should feel themselves the higher dignity 
of those who wait behind them and should make them- 
selves their ministers, and urge not their own claims but 
the claims which surpass their own, upon the central 
man. If they will not do that, then the man some- 
tiiiip.s puts out his hand, parts and. pushes aside this 
clamorous crowd, these physical appetites, these secular 



FASTING. 211 

ambitions. He says to them " Stand back, and at least 
for a few moments let me hear what culture and truth 
and charity and religion have to say to my soul." Then 
up through the emptiness which he has made by push- 
ing these clamorers back, there pours the rich company 
of higher thoughts and interests, and they gather for a 
time around the soul which belongs to them but from 
which they have been shut away. By and by the old 
crowd may return. The passions will not be satisfied 
until they have girdled the man's life once more. But 
even when they hold him fastest afterwards, they cannot 
but remember how they have once been driven back ; 
they cannot be as contemptuous as they used to be of 
that loftier circle of influences which still stands outside 
of them ; perhaps some time or other they may come to 
take and rejoice in their true place as interpreters and 
messengers through which the power of these higher 
influences may reach the soul. ) That is the story of the 
true fast. That is the real Leiit. It is the putting forth 
of a man's hand to quiet his own passions and to push 
them aside that the higher voices may speak to him 
and the higher touches fall upon him. It is the making 
of an emptiness about the soul that the higher fulness 
may fill it. It may be temporary. Once more the 
lower needs may fasten on us, the lower pleasures try 
to satisfy us ; but they never can be quite so arbitrary 
and arrogant as they were, after they have once had to 
yield to their superiors. They will be conscious that 
the soul is not wholly theirs. Perhaps some day they 
may themselves become, and dignify themselves by 
becoming, the meek interpreters and ministers of those 
\very powers which they once shut out from the souL 



212 FASTING. 

A man whose very bodily appetites brought him sug- 
gestions of divinest things, whose most secular life had 
playing freely through it the messages of God, he evi- 
dently would need no fast, no interruption of those 
pressures on his life which, with whatever "worldly- 
seeming hands they touched him, all brought him in- 
fluences from divinity. There will be no fasting-days, 
no Lent in heaven. Not because we shall have no 
bodies there, but because our bodies there will be all 
open to God, the helps and not the hinderances of 
spiritual communication to our souls. 

Do you remember the Collect for next Sunday, the 
first Sunday in Lent ? — "0 Lord, who for our sakes didst 
fast forty days and forty nights, give us grace to use 
such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the 
Spirit, we may ever obey Thy godly motives in right- 
eousness and true holiness, to Thy honor who livest and 
reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, One God, 
world without end. . Amen." When we pray that prayer 
next Sunday we shall begin with our Master's fasting, 
we shall remember how He put the associations and 
appetites of the earth aside that His Father might come 
close to Him. We shall pray to Him then to help us, 
too, so to let Spirit in where flesh is now, closest to 
our wills and selves, that hereafter we may be more 
full of spiritual influences always, more ready to do 
what is right than to do what is pleasant, more sensitive 
to the fear of God than to the fear of man. Is it not 
indeed a noble and a thorough prayer ? How earnest 
must be the man who really prays it ! How happy is 
the man in whom it really is fulfilled ! 

Suppose you go, some one of you whose life is all 



FASTING. 213 

external, all animal, either in the grosser or the more ele- 
gant ways, — suppose you go to some lofty or beautiful 
thinker, to some philosopher or poet, and you say to him, 
" Speak to me ; tell me your thought ; make me the sharer 
in your ideas and visions." He looks into your face, he 
sees what manner of man you are, and has he not the 
perfect right to answer you, " I cannot. You must fast 
first. Wrapped round with soft physical indulgences, 
all padded and protected as you are, how shall I strike 
into your muffled intelligence and feeling ? You must 
strip these coverings off. You must lay bare your 
pampered life. You must give up being a sybarite or 
profligate. You must make me an avenue through this 
throng of lusts. Then I can come to you and you can 
take me in " ? It is not arrogance. He cannot speak to 
you until you open the way. Your frivolity is like a 
solid wall about you and you must break it down before 
he can come in. That is why fashionable society is 
neither intellectual nor spiritual ; why any man or woman 
must break its chains and refuse to be its slave, or it is 
impossible to come to the best culture either of mind or 
soul. There is no nobler sight anywhere than to behold 
a man thus quietly and resolutely put aside the lower 
that the higher may come in to him. Every now 
and then a conscience, among the men and women who 
live easy thoughtless lives, is stirred, and some one looks 
up anxiously, holding up some one of the pretty idle- 
nesses in which such people spend their days and 
nights, and says " Is this wrong ? Is it wicked to do 
this ? '' And when they get their answer, " No, certainly 
not wicked," then they go back and give their whole 
lives up to doing their innocent little piece of useless- 



214 FASTING. 

ness again. Ah, the question is not whether that is 
wicked, whether God will punish you for doing that. 
The question is whether that thing is keeping other 
better things away from you ; whether behind its little 
bulk the vast privilege and dignity of duty is hid from 
you ; whether it stands between God and your soul. If 
it does, then it is an offence to you, and though it be 
your right hand or your right eye, cut it off, pluck it 
out, and cast it from you. The advantage and joy will 
be not in its absence, for you will miss it very sorely, 
but in what its loss reveals, in the new life which lies 
beyond it, which you will see stretching out and tempt- 
ing you as soon as it is gone. To put aside everything 
that hinders the highest from coming to us, and then to 
call to us that highest which, nay. Who is always wait- 
ing to come, — fasting and prayer, — this, as the habit 
and tenor of a life, is noble. As an occasional effort 
even, if it is real and earnest, it makes the soul freer 
for the future. A short special communion with the 
unseen and eternal, prevents the soul 'from ever being 
again so completely the slave of the things of sense 
and time. 

Have we not then understood something of what the 
essential values of fasting are ? It is both a symbol and 
a means. Every kind of abstinence is at once an 
expression of humility and an opening of the life. 
What then is Lent ? Ah, if our souls are sinful and are 
shut too close by many worldlinesses against that Lord 
who is their life and Savior, what do we need ? Let us 
have the symbols which belong to sin and to repentance. 
Let us at least for a few weeks, among the many weeks 
of life, proclaim by soberness and quietude of life that 



FASTING. 215 

we know our responsibility and how often we have been 
false to it. Let us not sweep through the whole year in 
buoyant exultation, as if there were no shame upon us, 
nothing for us to repent of, nothing for us to fear. 
By some small symbols let us bear witness that we 
know something of the solemnity of living, the dread- 
fulness of sin, the struggle of repentance. Our symbols 
may be very feeble, our sackcloth may be lined with 
silk and our ashes scented with the juice of roses. But 
let us do something which shall break the mere monot- 
ony of complacent living which seems to be forever say- 
ing over to itself that there is no such thing as sin, that 
to live is light and easy work. Perhaps the symbol may 
strike in and deepen the solemnity which it expresses. 
Perhaps as we tell God of what little sorrow for our 
sins we have, our sorrow for our sins may be increased, 
and while we stand there in His presence the fasting 
\ may gather a truer reality of penitence behind it. 

And let those same symbols be likewise the means 
of opening our souls to Christ. For a few weeks let 
these obtrusive worldlinesses which block the door of 
our hearts stand back ; and let the way be clear that 
He who longs to enter in and help us may come and 
meet no obstacle. This is our lenten task. '' If any 
man will hear My voice and open unto Me, I will come 
in and sup with him," says Jesus. To still the clatter 
and tumult a little so that we may hear His voice, and 
to open the door by prayer, that is the privilege and 
duty of these coming weeks. 

I must not linger to draw out from these descriptions 
of what fasting is, the methods in which fasting may be 



216 FASTI^^G. 

best observed. I think that you will see them for your- 
selves. I am sure that if you have caught what I have 
said, you will not think that they are anything slight or 
fantastic or rigid or mechanical. It is the utterance of 
penitence and the opening of doors to Christ. It must 
be very sacred ; not formal but alive and giorifxed with 
motive. It must be very personal ; not imitated from 
any pattern but the utterance of each man's repentance 
and love and hope and fear. It must be very reason- 
able ; not unfitting the body for any good work but making 
it a more and more perfect instrument for the soul. 

May God be with us during this Lent. May we be 
with God. I dare to hope that there shall be among us 
much of that fasting which our Father loves; much 
penitence for sin and much opening of long-shut doors 
to Christ. my dear friends, let us enter into it with 
earnestness that we may come out of it with joy ! 



XIII. 

A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 

*'And they said unto him : We have not so much as heard whether 
there be any Holy Ghost." — Acts xix. 2. 

It is always strange to us to find other people entirely 
icrnorant of what makes the whole interest of our own 
life. We can hardly understand how it is possible that 
men should live along year after year, it may be genera- 
tion after generation, knowing nothing about what really 
makes life for us. If we did not have this or that re- 
source we should die, w^e should not care to live. Here 
is a man who has it not, and yet his life seems to be 
worth a great deal to him. He goes on bright and con- 
tented. Apply this to your love of reading. What 
would it be to you if every book were shut ? What 
would you do if all communication with great minds 
through literature were broken off, if all the stimulus 
which comes to your own mind were stopped ? And 
yet there are plenty of these men whom you meet every 
day who never open a book ! Or take the exercise of 
charity. You would find little pleasure in life perhaps 
if you were shut in on yourself and could do nothing 
for anybody else. At least there are people of whom 
that is true. To find some one whom you can help, and 
have him near you so that you can help him, is as 
necessary to you as your food and drink. But there 



218 A WHITSUNDAY SEKMON. 

are people enough who seem to thrive abundantly with- 
out one act of charity. No self-sacrifice breaks the 
smooth level of their selfish days. They live without 
that which is your very life. So of a multitude of 
things. To one man it is incredible that life can be 
worth having without wealth; another cannot under- 
stand how men can live without amusement ; and an- 
other, with his social nature, looks at his friend who 
lives in solitude, and wonders how and why he lives 
at all. 

But nowhere is all this so clear as in the matter of 
religion. One who is really living a religious life, one 
who is really trying to serve God, who is loving God 
and believes with all his heart that God loves him, who 
finds all through his daily life the thick-sown signs that 
he is not alone, that Christ is helping him and saving 
him, how strange and almost impossible it is for him to 
conceive of a life that has nothing of all that in it. 
How desolate it seems ! How tame it looks ! One 
man's days are full of "joy in the Holy Ghost." He is 
always looking up for inspiration and always receiving 
it. When he wants comfort there is the Comforter close 
beside him, nay, deep within him. And then he opens 
the gate into some brother's life and learns how he is 
living, and finds that there is nothing at all there of 
what is so dear to himself. That brother " has not so 
much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." 

This was just the position in which St. Paul found 
himself at Ephesus. He had been a Christian now for 
many years. It was far back in the past, the time when 
Jesus had appeared to him at mid-day and made him 
His disciple. He had felt the powerful aid of the Holy 



A WHITSUNDAY SERMON". 219 

Spirit in many a difficult moment of his life. All that 
he did and said was in the confidence and by the help 
of this unseen Friend who was nearer to him than any 
of his closest earthly friends. And now he came to 
Ephesus where there were some people who called 
themselves Christians, and looking for their sympathy 
and fellow-feeling he inquired, " Have ye received the 
Holy Ghost since ye believed ? " And they said unto 
him, " We have not so much as heard if there be any 
Holy Ghost.'' What was everything to him, they knew 
nothing at all about. No wonder that his soul yearned 
over them and he stayed with them and taught them. 
We can picture his joy as gradually they became shar- 
ers in his happiness. What greater joy can any man 
desire than to bring any other man who has known 
nothing of it into the knowledge and the power of the 
Holy Ghost ? 

This is our subject for Whitsunday morning. What 
is it to know and not to know " whether there be any 
Holy Ghost ? " Are there not many men among us 
who, if Paul asked them the old question, would have 
to give the old Ephesian answer ? " Have you received 
the Holy Ghost, my friend ? " Be honest, and must 
you not answer as they answered, " Indeed I have not 
so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. 
The name indeed has sounded in my ears ; but as a real 
person I have not got any true idea of His existence ? '' 
Indeed the element of personal experience is so in- 
volved with all our knowledge of the Holy Spirit, that 
for any man to say " Yes, I know Him," is a vastly 
profounder acknowledgment than the statement of any 
other knowledge. That is the reason why it is often so 



220 A AYHITSUNDAY SERMON. 

vague and hesitating ; but just for the same reason there 
comes a time when a man certain of his experience can 
say "Yes, I have received, I do know the Holy Spirit" 
with a certainty and distinctness with which he cannot 
lay claim to the knowledge of any other thing or 
person. 

In order to understand our question let us turn to 
this story of the Ephesians. They were Christian be- 
lievers. They are called "disciples." They had been 
baptized after the baptism of John. They believed 
Christian truth and they accepted Christian duty. They 
had a knowledge of, a faith in Christ, but they had no 
knowledge of the Holy Spirit. The perception of a 
present God who should fill out belief in truth w^ith 
personal apprehension, and who should make duty de- 
lightful by personal love, this they had not reached ; no 
one had told them of it. 

It was a strange condition. It is not easy to recon- 
cile it with many of our Christian notions, but yet it is 
a condition which represents the state of many people 
whom we know, who seem to have just what they had 
and to be lacking in just what they w^anted. I suppose 
a man — and it is not all a supposition, the specimens 
are all around us — who believes the Christian truths. 
That there is a God who made and governs everything, 
that this God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, 
that He has lived and taught among men, and that at 
last He died for men in all the torture of the cross, and 
rose out of the grave in all the inherent power of His 
immortality, — this they believe. And all that God 
requires, all that Christ commanded, they accept. The 
duties of a good life, purity, honesty, resignation, self- 



A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 221 

denial, all of these they acknowledge. They try to do 
these duties. Their lives are often wonderful with the 
severe and lofty standards that they set themselves. 
They work heroically to fulfil the Master's will. Do 
Ave not know such men ? They often puzzle us. The 
aim of all their life is high. Perhaps as I describe 
them you know that you are such a man yourself You 
know that Christ is the great Master. His truth and 
His commandments you receive. But all the time you 
know that something is lacking, — a vividness, a life, 
a spring, a hopefulness and courage whicli you hear of 
other people having, which you sometimes see suggested 
in the things you do, which you seem to be often just 
upon the verge of, but which after all you do not get, 
and for the lack of which you are forever conscious of a 
certain dryness in your belief and a certain shallowness 
in your duty. What is it that you lack ? This lack 
which, if I speak to your consciousness at all, you recog- 
nize, this something which you want, I take to be pre- 
cisely the Holy Spirit. I do not know any other way 
in which He can become so real to a true, earnest man, 
as in the realization of just this want. 

Let us separate the two departments to which I have 
referred, and speak more particularly, first of Belief and 
then of Duty. We have all been familiar all our lives 
with the distinction between head-belief and heart-be- 
lief. We have been taught, sometimes in such a way 
that it puzzles us, sometimes in such a way that it was 
confirmed by all our deepest experience, that simply to 
know, even with the most unquestioning conviction, that 
certain things were true, was not really having faith in 
those things. We go up to the very limit of the belief 



222 A WHITSUNDAY SERMON". 

that can come either by traditional acceptance or by the 
conviction which argument produces, and there we 
stand. We cannot advance one step farther. We seem 
to have exhausted all the power that is in us. But we 
are sure that out beyond there is a region which, though 
we cannot enter it, is real, and is the true completion of 
the region through which we have already travelled. 

How familiar this is in our dealings with our friends ! 
I meet a man whom I have heard of long. Every 
authority in which I trust has told me that that man is 
wise and good. I come to know him well, and for my- 
self I see the evidence of his wisdom and goodness. He 
proves it to me by the things he does. I no more doubt 
it than I doubt the sun. I say that I believe in him 
and I do believe in him ; but all the time I am aware 
that out beyond the limit of this belief whi6h I have 
reached and on which I stand, there is a wliole new 
country, the region of another sort of belief in him into 
which I have not entered, where if I could enter for an 
hour everything would be different and new. I may 
be helpless. I may not be able to drag my feet across 
the border. I may stand as if chained by magic on this 
line which separates the head's belief from the heart's 
confidence and trust ; but, powerless as I may be to enter 
it, I know that all this other world is there, with the 
mists hanging over it and hiding it, but real and certain 
still, the land of personal friendship and communion. 

And just the same is true of truths. I know that 
some great truth is true ; our human immortality, let 
us say. Every one whom I trust has told me so. Those 
whose words are to me like gospel have assured me of 
it. I may even hear and believe that voice that speaks 



A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 223 

out of eternity itself. I may put full trust in the word 
of Christ which tells me that the dead are not dead but 
are living still. And my reason may be all convinced. 
I may be persuaded by every natural argument that the 
soul does not perish in its separation from the body, but 
goes on in its unbroken life. All this I steadfastly be- 
lieve. But what then ? Here I stand upon this clear 
sharp line. I am immortal. I say it over to myself 
and know that it is true. But still I am not satisfied. 
This certainty of immortality is nothing to me but a 
mere conviction. I get nothing out of it. It does not 
flow up into my duties and experiences. I am not 
stronger for it. I have not taken hold of it, nor has it 
taken hold of me. And, until this comes to pass, I feel 
a sense of incompleteness. I know in all my surest 
moments that there is an assurance which I have not 
reached. I know when my feet are planted the firmest 
on the outmost line of rational conviction that there is 
beyond that line a region of spiritual confidence which 
I have not entered. 

Here then are the two kinds of belief in persons and 
in truths. What is the difference between them ? The 
first is clear, definite, and strong. I know that he whom 
I believe in, be it man or God, is true and good. I 
know that the truth that I accept is certain and impreg- 
nable. But there is something hard, dry, literal, about 
my faith. I can write it all down and say all that I 
know about it in letters inscribed upon a book. I may 
contend for it vigorously, but I do not feed upon it. 
The other belief has in it just what this belief lacks. It 
has spirit. I cannot write it down in letters. My 
heart is full of it and it takes me right into the heart of 
the Being or, the truth tliat I believe in. 



224 A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 

Surely this difference is very clear. Surely we all 
know well enough that struggle after the heart and 
spirit of what our minds have accepted, which lets us 
understand it all. How often we have felt that disheart- 
ening certainty that we are holding tight the shells, the 
mere outside of our richest beliefs, and not getting at 
their soul and life. Sometimes have we not contended 
earnestly for our faith and told some unbeliever that he 
was losing precious truth because he did not hold it, 
and then gone off* from our discussion saying to our- 
selves gloomily, " Yes, it is all true, but still, if he held 
it only on the outside as I do, would he be so much 
richer after all ? " How often do we seem to ourselves 
to be like starving men, holding fruits that we know 
are rich and nutritious within, but cased in iron rinds 
which no pressure of ours is strong enough to break. 

We are then very often where these Ephesians were. 
What came to them and saved them was the Holy 
Spirit. What must come to us and save us is the same 
Holy Spirit. There they were holding certain truths 
about God and Jesus, holding them drearily and coldly, 
with no life and spirit in their faith. Paul came to them 
and said, " These truths are true, but they are divine 
truths. You can really see them only as you are shar- 
ers in divinity yourself, and look at them wnth eyes 
enlightened by the intelligence of God. God must come 
into you and change you. His Spirit must come into 
you and occupy you ; and then, looking with His Spirit, 
you shall see the spirit of the truths you look at ; full 
of the Holy Ghost, the ghost, the heart, the soul of these 
great verities shall open itself in all its holiness to you. 
You shall see Jesus. You shall lay hold on immortality 



A WHITSUNDAY SEEMON. 225 

not on the outside but on the inside, in the very heart 
and spirit. Is not this intelligible, my dear friends ? 
If Eaphael could enter into you as you stand before his 
picture, would you not see deeper than you do now ? 
Would not the Eaphael in the picture come out from 
depths which you have never fathomed ? If a child can 
be filled with the father's spirit, will not the spirit of 
the household, the intention, the purpose of it all, come 
out from the hard skeleton of its structure to meet the 
new spiritual apprehension ? And so if you can be 
filled with God, will not the soul of God's truth of every 
sort, as you stand face to face with it, open to you deeper 
and deeper depths, changing your belief into a more and 
more profound and sj)iritual thing ? 

This was what Paul prayed for and this was what 
came to those Ephesians. God the Holy Spirit came 
into them and then their old belief opened into a dif- 
ferent belief ; then they really believed. Do you ask 
what we mean by that ? Do you insist on knowing in 
exact statement how God entered into these people ? 
Ah, if you ask that, you must ask in vain. If you in- 
sist upon not receiving God until you^know how His 
life comes to your life, you must go on godless forever. 
You must know more than you do know, more than any 
man knows, of what man is and what God is and what 
are the mysterious channels that run from one life into 
the other, before you can tell how God flows into man 
and fills him with Himself Tell me, if you can, the 
real nature of your friend's influence, the inflow of his 
life on yours that makes you full of him. Only one 
thing I think we can know about this filling of man by 
God, this communication of the Holy Spirit, that it is 

15 



226 A WHITSUIS^DAY SERMON. 

natural and not unnatural, that it is a restoral of com- 
munication, that it is a reenthronement of God where 
He belongs, that the prayer which invokes the Holy 
Ghost is the breaking down of an artificial barrier, and 
the letting in of the flood of divine life to flow where it 
belongs, in channels that were made for it. If we 
know this, then the occupation of man's life by God is 
simply a final fact. It is just like the occupation of the 
body by the soul. No man can tell how it is ; but that 
it is, is testified by every form of human strength and 
beauty in which our eyes delight. 

Pause then a moment and think what Whitsunday 
was, the first Whitsunday. We read the story of the 
miracle. We hear the rushing of the mighty wind and 
see the cloven tongues of fire quivering above the heads 
of the apostles. Perhaps we cannot understand it. It 
seems natural enough that when Jesus is born the sky 
should open and the angels sing ; that when Jesus dies 
the skies should darken and the rocks should break. 
The great events were worthy of those miracles, or 
greater. But here at Pentecost what was there to call 
out such prodigies ? If what we have said is true, was 
there not certainly enough ? It was the coming back 
of God into man. It was the promise in these typical 
men of how near God would be to every man henceforth. 
It was the manifestation of the God Inspirer as distinct 
from and yet one with the God Creator and the God 
Redeemer. It was primarily the entrance of God into 
man and so, in consequence, the entrance of its spirit 
and full meaning into every truth that man could know. 
It was the blossom-day of humanity, full of the promise 
of unmeasured fruit. 



A WHITSUNDAY SEKMON. 227 

And what that first Whitsunday was to all the world, 
one certain day becomes to any man, the day when the 
Holy Spirit comes to him. God enters into him and 
he sees all things with God's vision. Truths which 
were dead spring into life and are as real to him as they 
are to God. He is filled with the Spirit and straightway 
he believes ; not as he used to, coldly holding the out- 
sides of thino^s. He has looked ridit into their hearts. 
His belief in Jesus is all afire with love. His belief in 
immortality is eager with anticipation. Can any day 
in all his life compare with that day ? If it were to 
break forth into flames of fire and tremble with sudden 
and mysterious wind, would it seem strange to him — 
the day when he first knew how near God was, and how 
true truth was, and how deep Christ was ? have we 
known that day ? 0, careless, easy, cold believers ! if 
one should come and ask you, '' Have you received the 
Holy Ghost since you believed ? " dare you, could you, 
answer him, " Yes " ? 

Let us take now a few moments to consider the other 
part of the Holy Spirit's influence, the way in which, 
when He enters into a soul, He not merely gives clear- 
ness to truth, but gives delight and enthusiastic impulse 
to duty. These Ephesians had not merely believed 
much Christian truth, thej'' had been trying also to do 
what was right ; they had accepted the Christian law 
so far as they knew it. We can think of them as very 
patient, persevering workers, struggling to do everything 
that they were told they ought to do. Now what did 
Paul do for them here when he brought them the knowl- 
edge of the Holy Spirit ? I think the answer will be 



228 A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 

found in that verse of the Savior s in which He described 
what the Holy Spirit's work should be. *' He shall take 
of mine and sliall show it unto you/' Jesus had said. 
The work of the Spirit was to make Jesus vividly real 
to men. What he did then for any poor Ephesian man 
or woman who was toiling away in obedience to the 
law of Christianity, was to make Christ real to the toiling 
soul behind and in the law. He took the laborer there 
in Ephesus who only knew that it was a law of Chris- 
tianity that he ought to help his brethren, and made it 
as personal a thing, as really the wish of Christ that he 
should help his brethren, as it had been to the twelve dis- 
ciples when they were living under Christ's eye, while he 
was with them in Judea or while they were distributing 
the bread and fish at his command to the hungry men 
by the sea of Galilee. This was the change which the 
Holy Spirit made in Duty. He filled it with Christ, so 
that every laborer had the strength, the courage, the in- 
citement to fidelity which comes from working for one 
whom the worker knows and loves. 

And very often when our tasks are pressing on us is 
not this the change we need ? Your Christian duties, 
the prayers you pray, the self-denials that you practise, 
the charities you give, — what is the matter with them ? 
The temptations you resist, the good word that you 
speak to some brother, the way )^ou teach your class, 
the way you condemn some prevailing sin, — what is the 
matter with them all ? What is the reason why they are 
so dull and tame ? Why are they not strong enthusiastic 
work ? The reason must be that there is no clear per- 
son for whom you do these things. You serve yourself, 
and how clear you are to yourself; and so, what life 



A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 229 

there is in every act of your own service ; but you serve 
Christ and how dim He has grown ! and so, how list- 
lessly the hands move at His labor ! Now if the Holy 
Spirit can indeed bring Him clearly to you, is not the 
Holy Spirit what you need? And this is just exactly 
what He does. I find a Christian who has really " re- 
ceived the Holy Ghost," and what is it that strikes and 
delights me in him ? It is the intense and intimate re- 
ality of Christ. Christ is evidently to him the clearest 
person in the universe. He talks to Christ. He dreads 
to offend Christ. He delights to please Christ. His 
whole life is light and elastic with this buoyant desire 
of doing everything for Jesus, just as Jesus would wish 
it done. So simple, but so pow^erful ! So childlike, but 
so heroic ! Duty has been transfigured. The weariness, 
the drudgery, the whole task-nature, has been taken 
away. Love has poured like a new life-blood along the 
dry veins, and the soul that used to toil and groan and 
struggle goes now singing along its way, " The life that 
I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son 
of God w^ho loved me and gave Himself for me." 

my dear friends, have you received the Holy Ghost 
since you believed ? Since you began to do your duty 
has any revelation come to you of Him Avho is the Lord 
of duty ? Have you caught any sight of Christ, and be- 
gun to know what it is to do it all for Him ? Has the 
love with which He lived and died for you been so 
brought home to you that you are longing only to thank 
Him by a grateful and obedient life ? Have you so 
made Him yours that He has made you His ? If so, 
the life of heaven has begun for you. Only to know 
Him more and more forever and so to o^row into com- 



230 A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 

pleter and completer service, there is your eternity al- 
ready marked out before you. It stretches out and is 
lost beyond where you can see ; but it all stretches in 
the one direction in which your face is set; deepening 
knowledge, bringing deeper love, forever opening into 
more and more faithful service. Go on into the richest 
developments of that life, led by the power of the Holy 
Ghost. 

Both in belief and in duty then, this is the work of 
the Holy Spirit ; to make belief profound by showing 
us the hearts of the things that we believe in ; and to 
make duty delightful by setting us to doing it for Christ. 
0, in this world of shallow believers and weary, dreary 
workers, how we need that Holy Spirit ! Remember, we 
may go our way, ignoring all the time the very forces 
that we need to help us do our work. The forces still 
may help us. The Holy Spirit may help us, will surely 
help us, just as far as He can, even if we do not know 
His name or ever call upon Him. But there is so much 
more that He might do for us if we would only open 
our hearts and ask Him to come into them. Eemember, 
He is God, and God is love. And no man ever asks 
God to come into his heart and holds his heart open to 
God, without God's entering^. Children, on this Whit- 
Sunday pray the dear God, the blessed Holy Spirit, to 
come and live in your heart and show you Jesus, and 
make you love to do what is right for His sake. Old 
men, aspire to taste already here what is to be the life 
and joy of your eternity. Men and women in the thick 
of life, do not go helpless when there is such help at 
hand ; do not go on by yourselves, struggling for truth 



A WHITSUNDAY SERMON. 231 

and toiling at your work, when the Holy Spirit is wait- 
ing to show you Christ, and to give you in Him the 
profoundness of faith and the delightfulness of duty. 

Let us come to Christ's Communion Table and cele- 
brate our union with Him and with one another, put- 
ting all fear and selfishness aside, and praying Him to 
show us there how rich a thing it is to believe in Him 
and how sweet a thing it is to serve Him by His Holy 
Spirit. 



XIV. 

CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

*'Tlie Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying : How can this 
man give us his flesh to eat ? " — John vi. 52. 

Any one who suddenly came upon a group of eagerly 
disputing men and overheard this question, unconnected, 
by itself, would see at once that he needed something- 
more before he could understand it, that it must have a 
history; and if it interested him at all he would in- 
quire how such a strange question came to be asked. 
The answer would be this : Yesterday, on the other side 
of the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus of ISTazareth worked a mir- 
acle, and fed a crowd of five thousand men with five 
loaves of bread and two little fishes. Durino- the niulit 
He crossed the lake. In the morning the people found 
that He was gone, and they took boats and followed Him. 
When He saw them, He told them that He was afraid 
they had come after Him not for His own sake, not 
because they loved or honored Him, but because they 
wanted another miracle and more bread. Then He 
goes on to tell them that the food they really need is 
food for the soul, not for the body. Then He offers 
them Himself as their Savior, their Master, their nour- 
ishment, their strength. And finally, led on into the 
strong figure by the first event which started his dis- 
course, the flocking of the people after food, He makes 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 233 

this singular and impressive announcement : " I am the 
living bread that came down from heaven ; if any man 
eat of this bread, he shall Kve for ever ; and the bread 
vfc^hich I shall give is My flesh, which I will give for the 
life of the world." Then came the question, tossed 
back and forth among the debating Jews, " How can 
this man give us his flesh to eat ? " 

From this simple sketch we can see that the discourse 
which the question interrupted was one of the most pro- 
foundly spiritual and solemn. The nurture of the soul 
of man by the communicated Kfe of God, that is what 
Christ is talking of. Earth and man seem to lie open in 
their need, with all their ordinary concealments stripped 
away ; heaven and God are open in their readiness to 
supply. All reserve is broken and the power of life, the 
manifested mercy of God, is offering itself to the want of 
man. In the very midst of this sacred offer comes in this 
question which at first only chills us and casts us back : 
'' How can this man give us his flesh to eat ? " We 
have been so carried on by the speaker's spirit that we 
have been ready to accept anything. The special form 
in which He clothed His offer has not staggered us. 
We have not stopped to analyze it, hardly to notice it. 
But here are some cooler or more captious Jews ; nay, 
perhaps some Jews who, being more anxiously in earnest, 
do criticise and weigh every word in which the offer 
comes, and to them this form seems so strange as to be 
unintelligible, and so we begin to hear the murmur 
drifting round, '' How can this man give us his flesh to 
eat ? " 

What was the spirit of the question ? I have just 
suggested that there are different spirits in which it 



234 CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

might be asked. There are two ways in which you may 
assent to any statement that you hear. You may not 
care much about it, and merely say " Yes " to it be- 
cause it does not interest you enough to make you criti- 
cise it at all. Or, on the other hand, you may go down 
to the very bottom of it and believe it true with all 
your heart. And so there are two ways of questioning 
a statement, the superficial and the profound, the flip- 
pant and the earnest way. One man asks questions 
because he wants to prove the announcement false. 
Another man asks because he longs to see it prove itself 
true. There is the arrogant and wanton objector ; and 
there is the eager questioner who so dearly loves the 
vision which the words he has just heard have raised be- 
fore his mind that he hardly dares to ask about it lest he 
should lose it, but yet who must ask because it is too 
dear to be left in doubt. Both of these must have been 
present in the crowd which heard the words of Christ. 
Hence came the strife. One man said " I believe it," 
and you saw as he spoke that he had thought deeply 
and been deeply touched and really did understand and 
believe. Another said " Yes, I believe it," and you saw 
that he was a merely thoughtless partisan admirer of 
Christ, not having reached any true comprehension of 
his Master and not knowing what he was talking about. 
Another said " How can it be ? " and his " How can it 
be ? " evidently meant " It shall not be if I can help 
it." Another said "How can it be ?" and you saw his 
face all wistful as he spoke, as if he said " It sounds 
like what I want. 0, if I could only see just what He 
means and get hold of the truth and strength which I 
am sure there is in what He says ! It eludes me, but 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 235 

I am sure that it is there. How can it be ? " These 
were all present in the crowd. 

Now let us leave the company which was assembled 
on the shore of Gennesaret and come down to our own 
time and place. Still men are striving among them- 
selves with the old question. Still the earnest believer, 
the flippant partisan, the captious objector, and the wist- 
ful inquirer, are busy with these words of Christ. These 
words have kept their hold upon the world. Now, just 
as then, they are not words to be ignored. Men will 
ask what they mean. Men are asking one another ; nay, 
souls are divided within themselves and do not know 
how to think in seeking the answer to that old ques- 
tion, " How can this man give us His flesh to eat ? " 

What answer can we give ? To the captious objector, 
in this as in every other question concerning Christ 
there is no answer really to be given. If a man wishes 
to find the religion of Christ untrue and asks you ques- 
tions about it with the distinct desire of convicting your 
Master of folly or of fraud, then there is simply nothing 
for you to do but to turn off from him and go your 
way ; not angrily, not with any idea of punishing him 
for his obstinacy by shutting him out of the truth. You 
have nothing to do with that. If such a terrible penalty 
as that can be inflicted, G-od must inflict it, and not you. 
You must get the truth in to any most closed soul 
where it is possible to send it ; but if a man is wilfully 
obstinate and determined to find fault, you have to turn 
away simply because it is impossible by the very nature 
of the things to make him see and believe. For what- 
ever the announcement of Christ may mean, it means 
something whose understanding must be experimental 



236 CHEIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

certainly ; it declares something which the heart must 
feel before the mind can comprehend it. It is a law of 
spiritual action and so appeals to the spiritual function 
for its recognition. If that spiritual function is closed 
and bolted against its access by the heavy will there is 
no hope that it can enter in another way. If you hold 
a rose up before a man and he shuts his eyes tight and 
just holds out his hands and says "Here, I am ready 
to be persuaded ; convince me by touch that your rose 
is red ; '' then you are helpless. If you hold a spiritual 
power up to the conscience and the heart, and the con- 
science and the heart are shut tight, refusing to obey 
and love, then you are hopeless even if the intellect 
does cry " Convince me." Christ in every claim is 
spiritual demand as well as mental conviction, and so 
the willing heart must go with the open mind. Nothing 
is harder or more painful than to try to tell a man who 
is simply interested in Christianity as a curious prob- 
lem, what Christ is to you as Savior and Master and 
Friend ; and to see not merely that he utterly fails to 
understand you but that he thinks all such accounts 
of your own experience and such appeal for a new spir- 
itual sense in him to be thoroughly unreal, irrational, 
and absurd. 

We must speak then mainly to others ; to those who 
do not want to disbelieve, those who are willing to believe. 
Some of them do believe already. Having long made 
Christ a spiritual study, kept their lives close to His for 
years, He has borne witness of Himself to them and 
they have drawn much up from Him. He has fed them 
richly ; but still, when the full words are put before 
them, about " eating his flesh," it seems as if there were 



i 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 237 

still something a great deal deeper than they have 
known yet, ^nd they begin to ask with vivid anticipa- 
tion of some new experience of the Savior, made delight- 
ful by all their recollection of the old, " How can He 
give me His flesh ? I would know all if there is more 
to know, now that I have known so much and found it 
so full of joy and strength." 

And then there are others w^ho do not believe but 
who want to ; who cannot claim any personal experi- 
ence of Christ but who long for it; who hear others 
telling what He has done for them and who wish that 
they might know something of all this ; who hear His 
own account of what He can do, outgoing any story that 
any ripest saint has to tell of what He has done ; those, 
in one word, who want a Savior and feel that this must 
be their Savior though they cannot see just how His 
work is to be done. These are the people that I want to 
speak to especially to-day, for there are no people in the 
world in whom Christ must feel so deep and tender an 
interest, none of whom we are so. sure that He would 
say as He said of the scribe in the Gospel, " Thou art 
not far from the kingdom of God." 

And the very first thing that one wants to say always 
to such people is this ; that although they cannot get 
the assurance which they need out of the reported ex- 
perience of other people, yet the experience of others 
may give them an assurance of the possibility of gain- 
ing wdiat tliey want and so may help them very much. 
It does not make you warm, perhaps it makes you feel 
all the colder, to see other men walking off there in 
the full sunlight ; but it may let you know that your 
case is not hopeless, that if you sit and wait a little 



238 CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

longer the light that is shining on them may move on 
until it reaches you ; or, what is better still, that if you 
will you may get up and go into the sunlight which will 
then warm you as much as them. Either way the sight 
of their comfort gives you hope and courage, which is 
what you need. So it is in religious things. A verse 
of Scripture may be all dark to you, but you know that 
multitudes have found in it the revelation of light and 
life. You cannot possibly take their comfort in it for 
your own. All spiritual culture is a great deal too in- 
dividual for that. But you can believe that there is 
comfort in it and search after it more hopefully because 
they found it there. It must signify something to you 
that, though it seems so unintelligible to you, there 
have been hundreds of thoughtful men and women 
whose soul's life has run deep and strong as a river, 
who have looked for truth with eyes quickened by much 
knowledge of life and human need, who, if you had 
asked them for the secret of human existence, would 
have done nothing, but turn and lay their hand upon 
this chapter and say : " Except I eat His flesh and drink 
His blood I have no life. That is my only life. I 
feed on Him.'' You may say it proves nothing and ex- 
plains nothing. It makes us believe at least in the pos- 
sibility of proof and explanation. 

And one thing more. Notice how Christ receives 
this doubting question : " How can this man give us 
His flesh to eat ? " '' Except ye eat the flesh of the Son 
of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.'* 
That is His answer. It reminds us of another scene. 
In the third chapter of St. John, Jesus says to Nicode- 
mus, " Except a man be born again he cannot see the 



CHKIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 239 

kingdom of God ; " and Mcodemus answers, " How can 
a man be born when he is old?" and Jesus answers 
him, "Except a man be born again he cannot enter 
into the kingdom of God." You see the similarity of 
the two cases. In each of them Christ says " It must 
be ; " and in both cases the answer comes, " How can it 
be ? " and in both again the answer is, " It must be ; " 
nothing more. What does it mean but this, that you 
cannot know how it is done except by doing it? You 
ask me " How ? " The answer is, " I cannot tell you. 
Go and do it and you shall learn." It may seem strange, 
but it is no new law. It is a law which runs through 
all life in application to the highest things. I cannot 
tell you how to meet sorrow. Go and meet it and you 
shall learn the sweet lesson out of the bitter education. 
I cannot tell you how to meet joy so that the head shall 
not be turned. It is when the head is tempted to be 
giddy that it learns soberness in prosperity. I cannot tell 
you how to meet death. Who ever did tell his brother ? 
Nay, can even God tell us so that we can know before- 
hand what we shall say to the king of terrors when at last 
he stalks across our path ? But, going straight up to him, 
what beautiful sights have we not seen of old men greet- 
ing him as their friend, and strong young men letting 
him take their burden off of their yet unbent backs, and 
little children laying their hands trustingly in his to go 
down the dark way which he knows, which leads into 
the Father's light. Of all these highest trials there can 
be no previous experiment to see how it is done. You 
must do it. So only can you learn how to do it. " How 
can I ? " cries the poor bereaved heart sitting in the 
darkened room alone ; " How can I live my dreary life 



240 ^ CHEIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

alone ? " " Go on and live it " is the answer. And as 
he goes it is not dreary and he can live it bravely in 
Christ's strength. So it is with being a Christian. Be 
one ; so only can you kDow how. " How can I eat His 
flesh ? " " Except you do you have no life." It seems 
hard and unreasonable, this inexorable demand for the 
unintelligible and impossible ; but it is only the prin- 
ciple of all experimental truth ; that in no other way 
than by experience can it be learned. It seems to 
involve a contradiction but yet it is the method of 
much of the very best progress which we make, and we 
all act on it constantly. 

** You must love Him, ere to you 
He shall seem worthy of your love.*' 

But now after all these preliminary words, let us^go on 
and see if we can understand the question and at all see^ 
its answer. " How can this man give us His flesh to eat ? " 
The whole expression which called out the question is a 
figure. It is figurative through and through. Even the 
most literal Eomanist who applies it all to the sacra- 
ment of the Lord's Supper and treats that sacrament 
in the most material way still must own something of 
a figure in it. The bread even though turned into the 
sacred flesh is still eaten by the bodily mouth for spirit- 
ual purposes, and it seems impossible to bridge over the 
gap in the idea between the physical and spiritual nour- 
ishment without some intrusion of analogy or figure. 
The figure is very vivid and graphic, so clear and sharp 
that it sometimes seems as if there were no figure there, 
as if it were the statement of the baldest material fact, 
but it is figurative nevertheless. 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 241 

And the general spirit of the figure is clear ; it means 
support or strength. That is the idea of food. Only 
food means a certain kind of strength. It is strength in 
a man, not strength Avithout a man. It is strength in- 
corporated and not strength applied. You see the dif- 
ference. If a wall is tottering upon the street the men 
come with their timbers and wedge them in and brace 
the bulging building back and hold it up. If a man is 
weak so that his legs tremble under him, you give him 
food, and the strength of the food enters into him and 
becomes his strength, and he stands firm. There is the 
strength of a buttress which sustains a tower, or a rock in 
which a tower is set. That is outward strength. There 
is the strength of food which supports the man by be- 
coming the man. Evidently that is something different. 
That is inward strength. And this last is the sort of 
strength which Christ promises in the gift of Himself. 
Thus much is clear in the word " eat." 

We easily distinguish everywhere between the two 
sorts of strength, and the last is more valuable in so far 
as it is more intimate and personal. The outer strength 
is the strength of the prop and the buttress ; the inner 
strength is the strength of the life-blood in the veins. 
You have a hard duty to do to-morrow morning, something 
which you thoroughly hate to do. Your reluctance makes 
you weak. But you must do it because it is God's will 
and so your duty. You do not expect or try to escape, 
but you cry out to God to strengthen you, and He has 
two waj^s of answering your prayer, one better than the 
other, which He uses according as He finds you open 
and fit for the lesser or the larger mercy. He may 
bring all His commandments and penalties and lay 

16 



242 CHEIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

them up like buttresses against the weak wall of your 
resolution and crowd you into duty by the pressure of 
compulsion and of fear. Or He may fill you so with 
Himself, make you love Him so that you shall, as the 
Collect beautifully prays, " love the thing that He com- 
mands," and so grow into duty by the inspiration of 
His character, His standards. His life, become yours by 
love. Or again, you are too weak for your sorrow. 
What does He do to give you strength? (He may per- 
haps take the sorrow off; or He may give you something 
to beguile it, something that makes you proud to suffer, 
or some strong friendship that is brought out by your 
suffering and almost makes you forget your agony. J 
Those are external strengths. Those are buttresses 
against the walls. He may do something better. He 
may give you that unutterable certainty of His sympa- 
thy which does not abolish pain but transforms and 
transfigures it, so that you would not let the suffering 
go if with it you must lose this precious nearness of 
God. He may make suffering, by some such exquisite 
mixture, the source of rich delight and holy deeds, so 
that the suffering itself becomes the central pillar of 
the life, and does not have to be held up, but holds. 
That is the inner strength. That is the strength of 
food. 

And notice how this last alone is vital. It alone 
makes life. It lives. The buttress keeps the dead wall 
standing, but the sap makes the live tree still more alive 
with growth. So compulsion and fear keep us true to 
duty, but love makes us larger and fit for greater duty 
every day. Every vital strength must be the strength 
which incorporates itself with the very being of the thing 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 243 

that it supports. Except we eat we can have no life 
in us. 

Now we must remember that the great trouble of life 
with which religion has to do, the only weakness that 
really can give a man the most deep and poignant sor- 
row, must be moral trouble, must be sin. There alone 
can self-reproach come in; and if a man has nothing to 
reproach himself with he can bear anything. But when 
we are speaking of the weakness of sin then it is evi- 
dent that the only strength that can be sufficient for it 
must be the strength that enters into and becomes part 
of and changes the sinful nature. You have done 
wrong, you are wrong, and in your wickedness you are 
weak as the wicked always are. You are tottering and 
trembling under the fear of punishment, under the sense 
of broken harmony with God, but most of all under the 
consciousness of a corrupted and perverted nature in 
yourself. What does Christ do for you ? First, He 
declares forgiveness. That takes away the fear of pun- 
ishment. He calls on you to believe that you are par- 
doned. He asks of you that faith which, laying hold 
of His great love, shall see the penalty of broken law 
broken itself and trodden under foot by triumphant 
grace. He reveals God's love to you. He shows you 
a Deity not angry but infinitely pitiful. Against the 
wall tottering with a sense of divine displeasure He 
builds the strong buttress of an assured love of the 
Father you have sinned against, and so keeps you from 
falling. These are external strength. If they stood by 
themselves they would be only external. The soul, sure 
that the past is forgiven, feeling above it the pitying 
presence of a grieved but loving God, has every outward 



244 CHEIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

Strength for holiness that it could ask. But what then ? 
If still the sinful nature stays within, if the whole loved 
and forgiven man is still full of the old bad impulse, 
what is there still but weakness ? Some new strength 
must come, and it must be inward and not outward. It 
must enter in and change the nature. It must min- 
gle itself with the soul itself and make that holy which 
was unholy, set that right which was wrong. It must 
be a new birth of goodness in the man as well as a new 
world of mercy about the man. It must be not only 
buttress to sustain but food to change ; not only a Christ 
to stand outside and support with the strong hands of 
His forgiveness, but a Christ to come in and strengthen 
by the power of His incorporated life. 

The two indeed are not so separate as we seem thus 
to describe them. They must come together. The 
outer and the inner, forgiveness and regeneration, are 
inseparable halves of one single mercy, given not sepa- 
rately but by one single act of pitying love. They can- 
not come separately. God does not forgive a soul and 
leave it still hopeless in its unchanged native sinfulness ; 
nor does God change a soul and leave its new life 
crushed under the burden of its old unforoiven sin. He 
does both, or He tries to do both, for every soul. But 
in our thinking about the great mercy there appear 
these two aspects of it, and we think of them separately. 
Christ is the Staff we lean on, the Eock we stand on, 
the Light that leads us, the Master on whose breast we 
lie ; but He is also the Bread of Life. He is many 
things outside of us, — Wisdom, Eighteousness, Ee- 
demption. He is also something inside of us, Sanctifi- 
cation. He says " Lean on Me, stand on Me, take hold 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 245 

of Me and walk." But when He takes up His deepest 
word it is this, — " Feed on Me ; unless you feed on Me 
you have no life in you." He says '' Look and see how 
good God is ; touch Me and feel God's mercy ; hear 
Me and I will tell you how He loves you." But at the 
last this comes as the commandment of the deepest 
faith, the promise of the highest mercy, — ''0 taste 
and see that the Lord is gracious." 

M;^^ dear friends, how noble and how beautiful it is. 
Great is the work that Christ does for us. Greater, 
deeper still, because without it all the other would be 
purposeless and useless, is the w^ork that Christ does in 
us. How wonderful it is. The world glows with the 
assurance of redemption. Heaven opens, and there 
the saints and elders are prostrate before the throne. 
The whole spiritual universe trembles with the new 
spiritual life which has come to it out of the marvellous 
death. In the midst of it all lies one soul, dead and 
incapable of action, though intensely alive with desire 
for a share in all this glorious vitality. It knows that 
all this is for it, and yet it cannot rise up and lay hold 
of it. The world about it is strong with the promise 
and temptation of holy things. The soul itself is weak 
with its own unholiness. Then comes the better, per- 
fect, completing promise of a change of soul. The 
Christ who has done all this offers to do one thing more, 
to make the dead soul alive and able to enjoy and use 
it all. He will come into us, not merely stand without 
us. He will come in and be Himself the power which 
lays hold of His own invitations. We may feed on 
Him. ISTay, let us take His own strong word and say, 
" He that eateth Me, the same shall live by Me." That 



246 CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

is the inner life, Christ in the soul rising up and laying 
hold of the infinite possibilities which redemption has pre- 
pared. Forgiveness is not too great a boon, earth is not 
too sacred or solemn, heaven is not too glorious, for the 
soul which, alive with Christ, claims all the spiritual 
life that Christ has created for its own. 

To feed on Christ, then, is to get His strength into 
us to be our strength. You feed on the cornfield and 
the strength of the cornfield comes into you and is your 
strength. You feed on the cornfield and then go and 
build your house, and it is the cornfield in your strong 
arm that builds the house, that cuts down the trees and 
piles the stone and lifts the roof into its place. You 
feed on Christ and then go and live your life, and it is 
Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, 
that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins 
the crown. 

But what is this strength of Christ that comes to us ? 
There can be only one answer. It is His character. 
There is no strength that is communicable except in 
character. It is the moral qualities of His nature that 
are to enter into us and be ours because we are His. 
This is His strength. His purity. His truth. His merci- 
fulness, — in one word. His holiness, the perfectness of 
His moral life. It is not that He made the heavens ; it 
is not that He is the Lord and King of hosts of angels, 
cherubim and seraphim, who do His will and fly on 
errands of helpfulness to laboring souls all through the 
world at His command. Those are the external strength 
which Christ supplies. In unknown, countless ways 
He furnishes it. Even the powers of nature He can 
mould to most obedient servantship to His disciple's 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 247 

needs. He helps us as the divine can help the human, 
by supplies of power coming from without and laying 
themselves against the tottering life. But this is not 
the strength which enters in and, by a beautiful incorpora- 
tion with the disciple's weakness, becomes his strength. 
That must be a strength of which the human disciple 
too is capable, as well as the divine Master. It must 
be that holiness which was in Jesus of JSTazareth and 
which we, because we are of the same humanity that He 
wore, are capable of possessing and developing. This is 
the strength of which we eat, and which like true food 
enters into us and becomes truly ours while it is still 
His. 

And this brings us to the understanding of that word 
" flesh.'' We are to eat His flesh. Now the flesh was the 
expression of the human life of Jesus. It was in His 
incarnation that He became capable of uttering those 
qualities in which man might be like Him, which men 
might receive from Him and take into themselves. 
Think of it. God had stood before men from the first, 
and they had looked with awe and adoration upon Him 
throned far above them. They had worshipped Him, 
they had feared Him, they had loved Him. Now and 
then some ardent and ambitious spirit soaring to the 
highest dream of the soul, or some patient and humble 
nature purified to deeper insight by its humility, had 
conceived that man ought not only to worship and fear 
and love God, but to be like God, to reflect in his own 
obedient nature the perfectness that he adored. But 
how ? What was it that he should reflect ? What was 
there in the Deity that could repeat itself in man ? Not 
His majesty, not omnipotence and not omniscience, surely. 



248 CHEIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

Men were bewildered ; and either vague and impious 
attempts to match the inimitable glories that belong 
only to divinity, like Eden or Babel ; or else reckless 
discouragement and brutal despair, as if nothing that 
was in God could be restored in man, as in the countless 
Sodoms and Gomorrahs of the ancient world, — these 
were the terrible results of the blind craving. Then 
came the incarnation. Here was God in the flesh. 
Solemnly, that of the divine which was capable of being 
wrapped in and of living through the human, was brought 
close within that wondrous human life lived in a human 
body. There was the God we were to imitate, to grow 
like to, to take into ourselves until He filled us with 
Himself. It was the incarnate God ; it was the God in 
the flesh that was to enter into man. This was the 
flesh we were to eat and by which we were to live. 

Do you not see this ? God in the heavens, the eter- 
nal unseen God, is true. His truth is the pillar of the 
universe. But can man win that truth ? It is too vast, 
too mighty, too bound up with omniscience. But be- 
hold here ! Here in the flesh is truth as perfect, as divine, 
yet truly human. Listen to the truth as it is shown to 
Pharisee and publican, to His disciples and His judges, 
to the young man who wanted to be His follower, and 
to Judas Iscariot who was to betray Him. That is the 
truth, that truth incarnate, the divine truth in the flesh, 
that we are to take and eat and make it truth in us. 
So of purity. It was awful as it flashed in solemn 
indignant judgments from the clouded skies. It was 
gentle, gracious, and human, though none the less divine, 
as it defied and cowed the devil in the temptation in 
the desert. So of pity, even. It awes us and consoles 



CHKIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 249 

US when it comes to us out of the unseen heart of God 
by the revelations of nature or our own experience. 
But it enters into us and makes us pitiful when it falls 
upon us in the soft tear-drops of the pitying Savior at 
the tomb of Lazarus. These are the acts that Jesus did. 
Take the yet more wonderful being lying behind them 
all which Jesus was, and see how that, in its perfect 
consecration, in its consecrated perfectness, became clear 
and imitable to men ; how men began to believe that 
they might be that divine thing too when they saw it 
in the incarnate God, in Christ ; and then, I think, you 
can understand something of how only in the flesh could 
God thus present Himself for the most intimate en- 
trance into man; so can know something of what Jesus 
meant when He bade the hungry human soul eat of 
His flesh. 

How high that hunger and its satisfaction is. You 
long for God to come and be within you, to rule you, to 
fill you ; nay, in the words that sound so mystical but 
are so real to multitudes who seek in vain for other 
words to tell the strange experience, for God to be you 
and* to live your life. That is a vast desire. How 
every other wish grows insignificant beside it. Do you 
know anything of it ? I trust you do. You look on 
high and God is too mighty. You look close by your 
side and Jesus Christ, the God incarnate, has the very 
words you need : " He that eateth My flesh and drinketh 
My blood dwelleth in Me and I in him." '' This is the 
bread that came dow^n from heaven." '' He that eateth of 
this bread shall live forever." Then there is nothing 
left but to cry, '' Come, come. Lord Jesus." 

But there is one thing more that I must say. This 



250 CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

giving of His own flesh for our food is always spoken of 
in connection with the great sacrifice of the flesh in 
which He gave it for us. There is always this associa- 
tion between the reception of the strength of the incar- 
nate Christ, and His crucifixion in which He willingly 
gave Himself up that He might furnish that strength 
to His people forever. The great Christian sacrament, 
which embodies this idea of which we have been treat- 
ing, the idea of the feeding of the soul upon the flesh of 
Christ, is all filled full of memories of the agony in 
which the flesh was offered. What does this mean ? 
Does it not mean this, — that however man longs for 
his God ; however man sees that in the incarnate 
Christ there is the God he needs and whom his nature 
was made to receive ; it is only when man sees that 
Divine Being suffering for him, only when he stands by 
the cross and beholds the love in the agony, that his 
hungry nature is able to take the food it needs, that is 
so freely offered ? The flesh must be broken before we 
can take it. This is what Christ says, and the history 
of thousands of souls have borne their witness to it, 
that it is the suffering Savior, the Savior in His suffer- 
ing, that saves the soul. Eager and earnest men may 
have gone beyond what is written, beyond what is pos- 
sible for us to know, in their attempts to analyze that 
suffering and in telling just how it works most wonder- 
ful effects. I believe they have. But do not let that 
make you lose sight of what the Bible tells you, that it 
is the death of Christ that saves the world ; nor of what 
your own heart must tell you if you let it speak, that it 
is only when you see this Savior whom you honor, whom 
you love and try to serve, dying to show a love for you 



CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 251 

which nothing short of death could utter ; only then that 
the soul opens wide enough with gratitude to take Him 
in completely to be its life and its salvation. 

The suffering Savior inly known, and through His 
wounds letting out His life into the starved lives of those 
who hold Him fast, that is the Gospel. It is not what 
church you belong to or what work you do, but what 
you know of, how deeply you are fed by Him — the suf- 
fering Savior. That is the question for the soul. 

Before His cross the lesson must be learned. Stand 
there until you are grateful through and through for 
such a love so marvellously shown. Let gratitude open 
your life to receive His Spirit ; let it make you long and 
try to be like Him ; let love bring Him into you so that 
you shall do His will because you have His heart. That 
entrance of His life into you shall give you strength and 
nourishment you never knew before. Then you shall 
know in growing, dependent, delighted strength, more 
and more every day, the answer to the old ever new 
question, "How can this man give us His flesh to 
eat ? " 

How can He ? Certainly He can if you will go to 
Him and pray to Him and love Him and obey Him 
and receive Him. And what a strength comes of that 
holy feeding ! Where is the task that terrifies the man 
who lives by Christ ? Where is the discouragement 
over which he will not walk to go to the right which 
he must reach ? You may starve him but he has this 
inner food. You may darken his life but he has this 
inner light. You may make war about liim but he has 
this peace within. You may turn the world into a hell 
but he carries his inner heaven safely through its fiercest 



252 CHRIST THE FOOD OF MAN. 

fires. He is like Christ himself. He has meat to eat 
that we know not of, and in the strength of it he over- 
comes at last and is conqueror through his Lord. It is 
possible, and may God make it real for all of us. 



XV. 

THE MANLINESS OF CHEIST. 

" Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me 
have." — Luke xxiv. 39. 

In these words Christ after his resurrection appeals to 
His disciples to bear witness that He is a true living man, 
and not a disembodied spirit. He bids them use their 
human senses to discover that He is truly human like 
themselves. The words therefore may represent to us 
the perpetual appeal which Christ makes to our human 
consciousness and to the perceptions of mankind to 
recognize His true humanity. As He then offered His 
human body for the inspection of His disciples, and bade 
them own that it was truly a man's body, so He is al- 
ways offering His whole human nature and calling on 
men to witness that He is truly human in thought and 
feeling and character, the pattern and fulfilment of 
humanity. 

I want to speak this morning of the Manliness of 
Christ. It is a subject of which many thoughtful men 
are thinking. A recent book of Mr. Thomas Hughes, 
whom one may almost call a student and connoisseur 
of manliness, has dwelt with very great force and beauty 
upon the manliness of Christ, and has turned many 
people's thoughts that way. He frankly accepts the 
challenge that if Christ is really the perfection of our 



254 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 

humanity He must present our human nature in such a 
shape and action that we men shall be able to recog- 
nize it by our best human standards as the truest and 
the best ; not weak, timid, sentimental ; but strong, 
brave, vigorous, full of feeling but also full of conscience ; 
full of reason ; patient by abundance not by lack of life ; 
tolerant, forgiving, meek, not from superficialness but 
from the depth of insight and emotion. So does this 
writer, with his genius for manliness, describe the manly 
Christ. He holds His picture up and as it were cries 
anew '' Ecce Homo," " Behold the Man." But at the same 
time he owns that somewhere, somehow, there has grown 
up a certain distrust of Christ's manliness, a certain mis- 
giving that the man of the four gospels does not com- 
pletely match with the standard of manly life which is 
most popular and current among men. There are actions 
of His, there are features of His character, which men 
need to study, Avhich perhaps they need to grow to, be- 
fore they can see that they are the types of truest man- 
liness. It is from these two facts that I wish to start 
in what I have to say. First, the fact that the character 
of Christ does satisfy the highest conceptions of our hu- 
manity ; and second, the fact that it is only the highest 
conception of our humanity which it satisfies, that the 
lower, the current, ordinary, commonplace notions of 
manliness are puzzled by it. Both of these facts are 
true and both are important. At first sight they may 
seem contradictory ; but out of a consideration of both 
of them together I think that we must reach a true 
idea of the nature and mission of the manliness of 
Jesus. 

And let me add one remark more. The very word 



THE MANLINESS OF CHKIST. 255 

" manliness " has a certain ambiguity about it. I think 
it is a word which many men are beginning to hesitate 
at using though they hardly know the reason why. It 
has a touch of cant. What does it mean ? It surely 
ought to mean the sum of the best qualities which char- 
acterize our humanity, joined in their true proportion. 
That is what manliness ought to mean. And evidently 
if it did mean that, then if our manhood is continually 
changing, rising, opening new possibilities, revealing new 
qualities, it must follow that manliness must be not one 
single invariable quality, but a constantly advancing 
and enlarging ideal of character, never completely and 
permanently settled until manhood shall have reached 
its best. It is necessary to bear in mind, I think, that 
manliness, in its truest definition, must be this ever 
changing and developing idea ; even while we feel our- 
selves at liberty to use the word in the popular and ordi- 
nary way, as if it were one fixed and constant and clearly 
recognizable condition of human life. At any rate it is 
only with this fullest conception of what manliness 
means that we can rightly understand the nature and 
influence of the manliness of Jesus. 

The Incarnation, then, the beginning of the earthly 
life of Christ, was the fulfilment, the filling full, of a hu- 
man nature by Divinity. We do not ask, we do not 
dare to hope to know, what was the influence upon 
Divinity of that mysterious union. But of what was 
its influence upon humanity there certainly can be no 
doubt. It made the man in whom the miracle oc- 
curred, absolutely perfect man. It did not make Him 
something else than man. If it had done that, all His 
value as a pattern for humanity, all His temptation 



256 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 

of men to be like Him would be gone. Whenever He 
says to men " Follow Me ; " " Be like Me/' He is declar- 
ing that He is man as they are men, that the peculiar 
Divinity which filled Him, while it carried human- 
ity to its complete development, had not changed that 
humanity into something which was no longer human. 
Can we picture that to ourselves ? Is it not just as 
when the sunlight fills a jewel ? The jewel throbs and 
glows with radiance. All its mysterious nature pal- 
pitates and burns with clearness. It opens depths of 
color which we did not see before. But still it is the 
jewel's self that we are seeing. The sunlight has made 
us see what it is, not turned it into something differ- 
ent from what it was. Or to take another illustration 
which perhaps comes nearer to our truth. A man be- 
comes a scholar. He learns all rich and elevating truth. 
As that truth enters into him, his human nature opens 
and deepens and unfolds its qualities. He becomes 
"more of a man," as we say in one of our common 
phrases. But that very phrase, "more of a man," im- 
plies that he becomes not something different from man, 
but more truly and completely man. His manhood is 
not changed into something else ; it is developed into a 
completer self by the truth which he learns. 

In both these cases one thing evidently appears ; which 
is that the developing power which brings the being 
into which it enters to its best has essential and natural 
relations to the being which it develops. The jewel be- 
longs to the light. The man belongs to the knowledge. 
And this must always be the truth which must underlie 
all understanding of the Incarnation. Man belongs to 
God. The human nature belongs to the Divine. It can 



THE MANLINESS OF CHEIST. 257 

come to its best only by the entrance and possession of 
it by Divinity. The Incarnation, let us always be sure, 
was not unnatural and violent but in the highest sense 
supremely natural It is the first truth of all our exist- 
ence that man is eternally the son of God, No man 
who forgets or denies that truth can really lay hold of 
the lofty fact that God entered into man. 

We may pass on then, with this truth clear in our 
minds that the Christhood was a true development and 
not a distortion of humanity, we may pass on to study 
the working of the law of development under other illus- 
trations. 

Human nature, we say, is developed by the advance 
of civilization. Man civilized is man filled out, carried 
along towards his completion. True civilization does 
not make man something else than mart It makes his 
manhood more complete. It gives him no new powers 
of thought or action. It sets free the powers- that 
belong to him as man. It makes him truly manly. 
But when we say this we at once remember what differ- 
ent views different men have always had of the effects 
of civilization. In general men have believed that civ- 
ilization was an advance. The civilized man has seemed 
in general to be completer than the savage man. But 
always, alongside of this opinion, there has run a more 
or less distinct remonstrance. Always there have been 
men who have dw^elt upon the loss which civilization 
has involved. Civilization has seemed to some men 
to mean deterioration. A certain freshness, freeness, 
breadth, spontaneousness, has seemed to make the sav- 
age a completer man than he who had been trained in 
many arts, and evolved through a long complicated his- 

17 



258 THE MANLINESS OF CHKIST. 

tory. The protest has not been clear or strong enough 
to shake the general conviction that the civilized man 
was the more truly human man ; but there is surely mean- 
ing, as there is deep pathos, in the way in which men 
have always looked back from the heights of the highest 
culture, and felt that they had lost something in the 
progress, longed for some charm of youth which the race 
remembered but found no longer in itself. 

And what is true of the race is true also of the indi- 
vidual. The boy grows up to be a man, and as he 
ripens he becomes more manly. His human nature, 
filled out with more knowledge and experience, com- 
pletes more nearly the full figure of humanity. But 
who is not aware of that strange sense of loss which 
haunts the ripening man ? With all that he has come 
to, there is something that he has left behind. In some 
moods the loss seems tp outweigh the gain. He knows 
it is not really so, but yet the misgiving that freshness 
has been sacrificed to maturity, intenseness to complete- 
ness, enthusiasm to wisdom, makes the pathos of the life 
of every sensitive and growing man. 

We stop a moment to observe how full the Bible is 
of this idea. The New Jerusalem with which it ends 
is greater and better than the Garden which blooms at 
its beginning. A more complete and manlier man 
walks on the sea of glass mingled with fire than walked 
in the shade and light of Eden. The whole story is of 
an education and a progress. And yet all through the 
Bible runs a tender and live regret for that lost imper- 
fect manhood. Better things may come in the great 
future, but it seems as if there were something gone in 
^he great past that never could come back. The edu- 



THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 259 

cation and progress are haunted by the memory of a 
fall. There is no thought of going back. The true 
completion of humanity always in the Bible lies before 
and not behind. And yet the flaming sword of Genesis 
always seems to shut man out from a tree of life which 
he never can forget even while he presses forward to 
the completer tree of never-failing fruit which grows by 
the side of the river of the water of life in the Apoca- 
lypse. 

It would seem then as if this truth were very general, 
that in every development there is a sense of loss as 
well as a sense of gain. The flower opening into its 
full luxuriance has no longer the folded beauty of the 
bud. The summer with its splendor has lost the fasci- 
nating mystery of spring-time. The family of grown- 
up men remembers almost with regret the crude dreams 
which filled the old house with romance when the men 
were boys. The reasonable faith to which the thinker 
has attaiiied cannot foroet the glow of vao-ue emotion 
with which faith began. The enthusiast, devoted to and 
filled out by his cause, misses the light and careless life 
he used to live. It is not that the progress is repented 
nor that the higher standard is disowned. Rather it 
seems to be a certain ineradicable charm that belongjs 

o 

to incompleteness, inherent in its consciousness of prom- 
ise and of hope, which lingers even when the promise 
has been fulfilled and the hope attained, and makes us 
sometimes almost seem to be sorry for the fulfilment 
and attainment. 

And now, after all this, let us come back to the 
manliness of Christ. I think that it all applies there 
and may give us some help. Suppose exactly that 



260 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST: 

to take place which the doctrine of the Incarnation 
assures us has taken place. Suppose that God should 
come and perfectly occupy a human life. That life like 
every human life belongs to Him. He occupies it with 
a certain supernatural naturalness. And what im- 
pression will that life, fully developed, developed com- 
pletely by the indwelling God, make on the men who 
see it ? Will it not open to them views of their own 
possibilities which they never had before ? Will they 
not say, *' Here for the first time is a man " ? Will 
they not see that all their old standards were poor and 
partial ? Will they not own that it is the supremely 
manly life ? This they will certainly do if by manli- 
ness they mean that which before I said they ought to 
mean, the full ideal of manhood," if they have not 
stopped short and formalized their notion of manliness 
at some incomplete attainment of human nature. And 
yet, will they do this readily and easily ? Will there 
be no clinging to the old standards ; no sense of loss in 
the abandonment of lower ideals ; no reaching back here 
too after the brilliancy of incompleteness, of partial un- 
symmetrical development ; no missing of the morning 
that came before this full noontide of character which 
is flooding their souls ? 

This is precisely what I think we see. Men call 
Christ the crown of manhood, the perfect man, and 
yet they need a book, yea, many books, to teach them 
that He is manly. They have given that name so long 
to brilliant incompleteness that they find it hard to 
carry it over to the complete life when it appears. The 
name of manly has become a certain fixed definite 
thing, not pliable and capable of advancement and en- 



THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 261 

largement to some new manifestation of what is worthi- 
est of man, what it is noblest for a man to be. 

This seems to me to be the real state of the case. 
Men own that the human character of Christ is the 
completest human character that the world has ever 
seen, and yet they give their admiration to incomplete 
characters ; and, not yet lifted to the full revelation of 
the Lord, they call that manly which they know all the 
while is something less " than the full-orbed attainment 
of the perfect man. Here is a Christian boy who loves 
Christ, honors Him, wants to please Him, wants to serve 
Him, and yet that boy carries in his mind a distinctly 
inferior type of character to which he gives this name 
of manly. He knows that Christ was and is tender 
and patient. Nay, it is because Christ has revealed to 
him that tenderness and patience are the consummate 
utterances of our manhood, that he has recognized the 
tender, patient Christ as being supremely man. And 
yet that boy's soul is haunted by the sense that in 
giving himself up to these new standards and making 
it the prayer and struggle of his life to be tender and 
patient, he would be losing something which he cannot 
bear to lose, the sternness and hardness and quickness 
to resent an insult, which all the earlier standards of life 
have agreed upon as the proofs of manliness. It is a 
strange condition, but is it not just exactly the condi- 
tion which we have found in all the instances of pro- 
gression and development of which we spoke ? The 
acceptance of the higher standard is haunted by a re- 
luctance to let the lower go. Many a man, as I believe, 
is to-day just in this condition. He knows that the 
humanity of Jesus is the type of all humanity. He 



262 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 

ought, if he knows that, to go right on and say, " Then 
Jesus is the manliest of men, and what He would do 
under any given circumstances must be the manliest 
thing that under those circumstances it is possible for 
any man to do. If He would not resent an injury but 
forgive it, then forgiveness, not resentment, must be 
true manliness." Does he say that ? No, he draws 
back and cannot let the charm of the old spontaneous 
unchristian resentment go, and strikes his revengeful 
blow and says, " I know it is not Christian, but it is 
manly," and so abandons his conviction that Jesus is 
the perfect man. 

This is not a mere question of the meaning of a cer- 
tain word. It is something far more real than that. It 
seems to me very clear that while men recognize in 
Christ a true and high humanity, so that they are will- 
ing in all their better moods to own Him as the pattern 
man, there yet lurks underneath this acknowledgment a 
quiet, half-conscious misgiving and questioning whether 
His manliness is one that the human heart can cordially 
accept and love. The reason is convinced, and the 
heart hesitates ; just the condition of the subject of any 
development where the heart still looks back with long- 
ing to the undeveloped state. This is the philosophy 
of that which we see everywhere, that of which I spoke 
at the beginning of my sermon ; the mixture of profound 
admiration for the character of Christ with a misgiving, 
a suspicion of some weakness in Him and in the life 
that implicitly follows Him ; a disposition to hold back 
the name of manly from the perfect man and His 
disciples. 

If this be true, then, it points us at once to what is 



THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. ^63 

most important, which is that the manliness of Christ 
has a double mission in the world. It is at once au- 
thentication and revelation. It must at once appeal to 
me to recognize it by the human instinct that there is 
in me already, and so trust Him for all He has to do ; 
and also it must enlarge, enlighten, and refine the in- 
stinct of humanity by which it has first been recognized. 
I know Christ because I know manhood; and then, know- 
ing Him, He makes me know manhood anew and far. 
more deeply. In other words, it is the work of the 
human Christ at once to satisfy and to reconstruct our 
notions of manliness. Alas for us if it were not so. 
Alas if, coming in among our ordinary human lives. 
His human life so absolutely fitted in w^ith them that it 
offered them no suggestion, gave them no lesson or 
rebuke. The real truth about the manliness of Christ 
seems to be this : that He is so like us that He makes 
us know that we may be like Him, and so unlike us 
that He makes us know that we must be unlike our 
present selves before we can be like Him. His life fits 
in among our human lives like a jewel which is so 
adapted to the gold into which it is set that nobody can 
doubt that they were made for one another, and yet 
which so far fails of suiting its place perfectly that we 
can see that the gold has been bent and twisted and 
must be twisted back again in order to accommodate 
it perfectly. He is at once our satisfaction and our 
rebuke. He has our human qualities ; He feels our 
human motives ; but in Him they take new shapes. It 
is with Him as it is with our best and noblest friends. 
They all first claim us by their likeness, and then shame 
and instruct us by their unlikeness. So it is with the 
manliness of Jesus. 



264 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 

Therefore there will always be a point where we shall 
fail if we depend simply upon the evident manliness of 
Jesus to make men believe in Him. If we say to men, 
" You have the standard in your own manhood to judge 
Him by/' there will always come a time when, before 
the judgment of their imperfect manhood, He will fail. 
But what we may say is : " You have the standard in 
your hearts to recognize Him by. Eecognize Him by 
that and make Him your Master and it will be His 
work to develop and refine the nature which first knew 
Him by His likeness, so that by and by it shall see that 
in the things in which He seemed to be most unlike to 
it. He still is and has always been the pattern and com- 
pletion of its truest self." 

I should like, if there were time, to turn and see with 
you how in His life on earth, which is recorded in the 
gospels, Jesus did for the men with whom He came in 
contact just this same double work. I can only suggest 
to you the many illustrations of it. There are three things 
perhaps, above all others, by which men think that they 
can recognize true manliness. The first is independence ; 
the second is bravery ; and the third is generosity. Now 
look at the life of Jesus as I hope that you remember 
it in the gospels. There is independence there certainly. 
He stood almost alone. A little group of disciples who 
only half understood Him were His company. The rest 
of the people grew more and more hostile as His career 
advanced. He more and more outwent His friends and 
more and more enraged His enemies. Yet still He 
stood unmoved. Men, whether they loved or hated 
Him, saw that He carried within Himself the convic- 
tions and determinations by which He lived. It was 



THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 265 

this, first of all, that made them feel His strength. " He 
speaks as one that has authority," the people cried one 
day when His discourse was finished. Another day the 
Pharisees came to Him and said, " Master, we know that 
thou art true, neither carest thou for any man, for thou 
regardest not the person of man." In all this there was 
something very powerful. This independence must have 
impressed the finest young spirits of Capernaum and 
Jerusalem as very manly. And then, when they were 
yielding to its influence and gathering round Him, think 
how they must have been staggered and thrown back at 
hearing this same independent Master declare as the 
very central secret of His life and power that He was 
utterly dependent on a nature which was above His 
own. '' I can of mine own self do nothing ; as I hear I 
judge." "He that taketh not his cross and foUoweth 
after Me cannot be My disciple." Only the very finest 
spirits among His followers were able to stand firm and 
loyal while the manliness which had attracted them at 
the beginning first seemed to fail them, and then opened 
before their eyes into a yet nobler type of manliness, of 
which dependence upon God lay at the very heart. 

This same is true of Christ's courage. Men saw Jesus 
stand on the hill at Nazareth among a crowd of hooting 
enemies. They saw Him stand calmly in the boat on 
the stormy midnight lake and never tremble. They 
saw Him face the gibbering maniac among the tombs. 
They saw Him set His face toward Jerusalem and go up 
thither quietly, knowing that there He would be crucified. 
They said to one another, " See how brave He is. He 
does not know anything like fear. Behold, what man- 
liness ! " And then, full of this enthusiasm, some of 



266 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 

them witnessed Gethsemane. They heard Him pray to 
be released from the approaching pain. They watched 
Him in the days before Gethsemane, as the horror of the 
coming death gathered around Him. " Father, save me 
from this hour," they heard Him cry. It is impossible 
not to believe that their conception of manliness under-* 
went first a shock and then an enlargement, as their Mas- 
ter showed them that sensitiveness to pain is a true and 
necessary element in the loftiest courage. 

Or yet again, think of Christ's generosity. An open, 
tolerant, and kindly temper, that welcomes confidence, 
that overlooks faults, that makes much of any good in 
other men, that easily forgives wrong ; that is a part of 
any ordinary notion of manliness. And this the men 
of Palestine found unmistakably in Christ. His life was 
always open. Whatever He had He would share with 
any man. " If any one shall speak a word against the 
Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him," He said. " Come 
unto Me, come unto Me," He kept saying as He went up 
and down the land. And to this frank, bright, open 
summons men did come. They recognized a man and 
gathered round His manliness. And then how often, 
just as they were crowding closest to Him, He said 
some word or did some action which let them see that, 
much as He loved them and wanted to welcome them, 
He loved something else behind them more, and could 
not welcome them completely unless they met Him in 
the broad chambers of truth and self-devotion. When 
Nicodemus comes to Him, Christ turns quickly in the 
midst of His generous greeting and says, " Except a man 
be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.'* 
When the eager young man comes running to give 



THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 267 

himself to the new Master, the Master meets him al- 
most with a blow. " Foxes have holes, and birds of the 
air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to 
lay His head." Men must have been perplexed and 
staggered by such words. " Is He then not generous, 
not cordial ? Does He not love us ? Does He not want 
us ? " they must have said to one another : and only 
slowly, as they dealt with Him, the deeper law of gen- 
erosity must have opened to them, that no man loves 
his brethren completely unless he loves the truth better 
than any brother ; that no man desires generously for 
his brethren unless he desires the best things for the 
best part of them, and will willingly sacrifice the j)oorer 
tliiugs which belong to the poorer part of them to secure 
that loftier attainment. 

In all these instances, and they might be multiplied 
indefinitely, the same thing, I think, appears ; and that 
is the way in which Christ's manliness first claims men ; 
and then, because it is a completer manliness than they 
have ever seen, it puzzles and bewilders men, and if 
they are not truly in love with it, repels and casts them 
off ; and only finally, He refines and elevates their idea 
of what it is to be manly by the deeper revelation of 
Himself, This is a truth which it seems to me we never 
can lose sight of when we talk or think about the man- 
liness of Jesus and its power over men. All through 
the history of Christ's presentation to mankind He has 
attracted men and He has repelled men. He has satis- 
fied and He has puzzled men's standards of human life. 
Both of the two are true and natural phenomena. If I 
could take Christ to-day — take Christ Himself and not 
merely some man's feebly told version of His story — if 



268 THE MANLINESS OF CHPJST. 

I could take Christ Himself out into the midst of a group 
of Western roughs, and set His calm presence in their 
midst, what should I see ? What would be His effect on 
them ? They would know His manliness certainly. But 
would they apprehend how thorough and complete His 
manliness was? They would call Him strong. But 
would they not also call Him weak ? He would meet 
and satisfy the best of the standards and instincts which 
He would find all ready in those rugged hearts ; but He 
would certainly disappoint them too ; and only through 
disappointment, and the revelation of Himself to hearts 
whose confidence in the completeness of their own first 
perceptions had been shaken, would they come finally 
to see that He was most manly in those very things in 
which He had seemed to them at first to be unmanly. 

And so it is that Christ has always come to men. I 
think that it is very like the way in which He came to 
the Jews. Christ's relation to Judaism always seems to 
me to be a sort of miniature and illustration of the 
relation in which He stands to humanity. He was 
a true Jew. Any Jew with a true Jew's heart must 
have owned Him for a fellow- Jew without a doubt. 
But He was too true a Jew to satisfy completely the 
stunted and imperfect Judaism of his time. A Judaism 
so far below the actual realization of its own best idea 
could not but be puzzled by Him. Only the best of the 
nation was able gradually to be taught by Him the full 
meaning of the national history, the full depth of the 
national idea. The life of St. Paul, and the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, show what the complete conception of 
Judaism was capable of reaching when it was filled out 
and interpreted by the complete Jew, Christ. 



THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST. 269 

Let this be the picture and parable of what the man 
Christ may do for humanity. So truly man that all 
mankind must know His manliness, He is yet so much 
truer man than all other men that it is only by the rev- 
elation of our humanity which He himself makes to us 
that we ourselves can know how thoroughly manly He 
is. Just see then what is the conclusion to which the 
end of our long study brings us. Is it not this ; that 
there are two knowledges of Christ, one lower and one 
higher ? There is one knowledge by which, just with 
our ordinary standards, if we are only sincere and true, 
we may know that this Man is a man above all other 
men, and take Him for our Master. When, with that 
knowledge, we have put ourselves into His power so 
that He may teach us and complete our incomplete con- 
ceptions, then another deeper knowledge comes. We 
learn to know not merely that He is manly because 
there are in Him those things which we as men most 
ardently admire ; but also that we can be truly manly 
only as we come by love and admiration and obedience 
to share the completeness of character which is in Him. 
The first knowledge brings us to obedience. The second 
knowledge is the power of spiritual growth. 

Into that higher knowledge may w^e all advance ; 
making Christ ours first, that in the end He may make 
us His. With reverent hands may we handle Him and 
see that He is truly manly, that He really wears our 
humanity, that so we may through His liumanity come 
to the Father God whom He reveals. 



XVI. 

HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

** I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." — 
Psalm cxxi. 1. 

Many people seem to think that the escape from 
trouble is everything, without regard to the door by 
which escape is made ; and that the finding of help in 
need is everything, no matter who may be the person 
of whom the help is sought. But really the door by 
which we escape from trouble is of more importance 
than the escape itself There oxe many troubles from 
which it is better for a man not to escape than to escape 
wrongly ; and there are many difficulties in wdiich it is 
better to struggle and to fail than to be helped by a 
wrong hand. In these first words of one of the greatest 
psalms of David, the nobleness which we immediately 
feel seems to lie in tliis, that David will seek help only 
from the highest source. " I will lift up mine eyes unto 
the hills, from whence cometh my help." Nothing less 
than God's help can really meet his needs. He will not 
peer into the valleys. He will not turn to fellow-men, 
to nature, to work, to pleasure, as if they had the relief he 
needed. " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from 
whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the 
Lord who hath made heaven and earth." 

How instantly we feel the greatness of a man who 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 271 

could write such words as those. He is great in his 
understanding of his own essential human greatness. 
Not every man is able to think so loftily of himself as 
to realize that in every true sorrow of his there is some- 
thing which only God ''who hath made heaven and 
earth " can comfort ; and that in every weakness of his 
there is something which only God " who hath made 
heaven and earth " can help. This is what we mean, I 
think, in large part, when we so often say that trouble 
tests men and shows what sort of men they are. It is 
the time of need that lets us see what men think of 
themselves, how seriously they contemplate their own 
existence, how they estimate their need, by letting us 
see where they seek their help. Have you never been 
struck by it ? One mourner in the hour of bereavement 
rushes into society or to Europe ; another turns to self- 
forgetting charity and spiritual thoughtfulness. One 
bankrupt begins to abuse the world for prospering while 
he is failing ; another rejoices, and finds the relief of his 
own misery in rejoicing, that some part of the world, at 
least, is better off by the action of the same forces which 
have ruined him. One man turns instinctively to the 
lowest and another to the highest, in his need ; and so it 
is that, in their own way, our hours of need become our 
judgment-days. 

I want to speak this morning of the duty of every 
man to seek help from the highest in every department 
of his life. I will not say only from the higliest, for 
we shall see, I think, how the lower helps come in in 
their true places ; but we need to be reminded that no 
trouble is fully met and no difficulty thoroughly mas- 
tered unless the trouble is filled with the profoundest 



272 HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

consolation and the difficulty conquered with the great- 
est strength of which its nature makes it capable. It is 
the forgetfulness of this truth, I think, which causes a 
large part of the superficialness and ineffectiveness of 
all our lives. 

For the truth rests upon another truth which we are 
also always ready to forget, which is that the final pur- 
pose of all consolation and help is revelation. The 
reason why we are led into trouble and out again is not 
merely that we may value happiness the more from 
having lost it once and found it again, but that we 
may know something which we could not know except 
by that teaching, that we may bear upon our nature 
some impress which could not have been stamped ex- 
cept on natures just so softened to receive it. There 
stands your man who has been through some terrible 
experience and found relief. Perhaps it was a terrible 
sickness in which he was drawn back from the very 
gates of death. Perhaps it was some mighty task which 
the world seemed to single him out to do, to fail in 
.which would have been ruin, and in which it seemed at 
one time certain that he must fail. Perhaps it was a 
midnight darkness that settled down over all truth, so 
that it seemed hopeless ever again to know anything 
truly of God or man. AVhatever it was, the experience 
has come and passed. There stands your man, relieved, 
released, out in the sunlight on the other side of it. 
What do you ask of him as he stands there ? Is your 
sense of fitness satisfied if he is only relieved, released ; 
if he is only like a man who, after a hard fight with the 
waves, has got his footing once more just where he was 
when he was swept away ? Certainly not. The human 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 273 

sense of fitness asks more than that. He must have 
seen something in the dark, or in the transition from the 
dark back to the light again, which pure, unclouded 
light could not have shov^n him. Into this kneaded 
and tortured life there must have been pressed some 
knowledge which the life in its best health was too 
hard and unsensitive to take, some knowledge which 
the life, restored to health, shall carry as the secret of 
inexhaustible happiness forth into eternity. Without 
these revelations the midnight and the torture would 
be inexplicable and hideous. But these revelations 
depend upon the way the soul's eyes look for help. A 
man may stand in the darkness looking at the ground, 
and when the dawn gathers round him he will only be 
glad of the light, but will have no perpetual and pre- 
cious memory of sunrise. This is the real reason why 
no release from difficulty or trouble is all that it might 
be to us, unless we have sought it from the highest and 
thank the highest for it when it comes. The eye comes 
out of the darkness trained by looking up. Let your- 
self be helped by the noblest who can help you, that 
you may know the noblest with that intimate knowl- 
edge with which the helped knows the helper, and that 
the power of knowing nobleness may be awakened and 
developed in you. 

1. But we shall understand this better and feel it more 
strongly if we pass at once to special applications of our 
truth and see it in its workings. Take first the ever- 
lasting struggle with Temptation. Every man who is 
more than a brute knows what it is. All men whose 
consciences are not entirely dead engage in it with some 
degree of earnestness. But how perfectly clear it is that 

18 



274 HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

any man who undertakes that struggle may look either 
to the valleys or to the hills for help, may call the lower 
or the higher powers to his aid. Suppose a man is 
wrestling with his passions. Some miserable dissipation 
which he never hates and despises so much as just 
when he is ready to yield to it, is haunting him all the 
time. His lust is all awake. His appetite is one day 
smiling and persuasive, the next day arrogant and bru- 
tal. " You must, you shall give way to me," it seems 
to cry to him. But still he fights. And in his weakness 
he looks round for help. Where shall he find it ? It 
seems to lie close by him, in the very structure of the 
body in which the lust is raging. There are the laws 
of health. Shall not they be his safeguard ? Let him 
be convinced that if he gives himself the bad indulgence 
which he craves, he will feel the quick answer in certain 
pain and drag a miserable body through a wretched life 
to a dishonored grave. Let him know that, and will it 
not give him the strength for resistance that he needs ? 
No doubt it will help him, though it will not be his 
highest help. Many a man is held back to-day from 
iniquity which his whole heart desires by the inevitable 
prospect of the pain, the sickness, the misery, the death, 
that an indulgence will incur. Indeed it seems as if 
some people thought that herein lay the gospel for the 
coming age; that just as soon as men had learned the laws 
of health completely, vice would be all abolished, and 
temperance and purity reign where the passions have 
so long trodden them under foot. Or take another case, 
and see a man tempted to dishonesty in some dealings 
with his fellow-men. Where shall he turn for strength 
to his integrity ? Let him picture to himself the dis- 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 275 

grace that must come if he is found out, the loss of repu- 
tation and of his fellow-men's esteem. Let him imagine 
himself walking the streets a despised, avoided man, 
with scornful fingers pointed at the detected cheat. 
Such visions, such fears as those, may help him, and he 
may resist the temptation to fraud, and keep his integ- 
rity unsoiled. Or yet again when a man is tempted to 
cruelty or quarrelsomeness he may resist because he 
considers that, after all, the discomfort of a quarrel is 
greater than the satisfaction of a grudge indulged. Or 
one who feels the weakness of indolence creeping over 
him may put himself into the midst of the most active 
and energetic men he knows and get the contagion of 
their energy and be kept alive and awake by very 
shame. All these are perfectly legitimate helpers for 
the man beset by his temptation. The fear of pain, the 
fear of disgrace, the fear of discomfort, and the shame 
that comes with the loftiest companionship, — we may 
have to appeal to them all for support in the hours, 
v^hich come so often in our lives, when we are very 
weak. But, after all, the appeal to these helpers is not 
the final cry of the soul. They are like the bits of wood 
that the drowning sailor clutches when he must have 
something at the instant or he perishes. They are not 
the solid shore on which at last he drops his tired feet 
and knows that he is safe. Or rather, perhaps, the man 
who trusts them is like a dweller in some valley dow^n 
which a freshet pours, who drives the stakes of his im- 
perilled tent deeper into the ground ; not like one who 
leaves the valley altogether and escapes to the moun- 
tain where the freshet never comes. "I will lift up 
mine eyes unto the hills," says David. Not until a 



276 HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

man has laid hold " behind and above everything else " 
npon the absolute assurance that the right is right and 
that the God of righteousness will give His strength to 
any feeblest will in all His universe which tries to do 
the right in simple imquestioning consecration ; not until 
he has thus appealed to duty and to the dear God of 
whose voice she is the " stern daughter ; " not till then 
has he summoned to his aid the final perfect help; 
only then has he really looked up to the hills. 

I have already said that when a tried and tempted 
soul thus flees to God and to the absolute righteousness, 
he does not cast the lower helps away. Still as he 
looks up to the hills his eye is led there along the grad- 
ually rising ground of lower motives. The man who 
keeps his purity and honesty and strength because he 
is God's child and must do his Father's will, may still 
care for his health and his reputation and cultivate a 
healthy shame before his fellow-men. But these are 
not the king he serves. They are only, as it were, the 
servants who bring him the king's orders ; to be heeded 
and obeyed, but not for themselves but for their king 
who sends them. 

This will seem clear enough if we remember how 
there come times in all the deepest lives when the ser- 
vant has to be disobeyed in order that the obedience to 
the king may be complete. The preservation of health, 
the care for reputation, cannot be the final safeguards 
and citadels of purity and integrity, because there come 
times in which, just in order that purity may be kept, 
health and even life have to be cast away. Just in order 
that a man may still be upright he has to walk directly 
across his fellow-men's standards and forfeit their regard. 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 277 

But the time never comes when a man to be good has 
to disobey God. Therefore it is that obedience to God 
is the only final and infallible help of the soul in its 
struggle with temptation. The rest are the fortifications 
around the city. Sometime their destruction may be 
the only way to save the city which they were meant to 
guard ; but the heart of the city itself, the citadel where 
the king sits, the city cannot perish so long as that is 
safe ; and when that falls, the city's life is over. 

I beg you, my dear friends, old men and young men, 
all surrounded with temptations which will not give 
you rest, to know and never to forget that there is no 
safety that is final and complete until your eye is fixed 
upon the highest, until it is the fear and love of God 
that is keeping you from sin. It is good for every man 
to care for his life and his reputation. Let the doctors 
show us more and more how every wrong we do our 
bodies shortens and impairs our life. Let experience 
teach us more and more that he who is mean and base 
will surely some day find himself despised. But these 
are not enough. The rectitude which they alone protect 
is not the highest rectitude. It is a selfish, calculating 
thing. And it is wholly possible that they may them- 
selves become the betrayers of the rectitude which they 
are sent to guard ; so that a man, to keep his life, may do 
his body wrong, and to keep his reputation may go 
down into the most miserable meanness. You are never 
wholly safe until your eye is fixed on God, and until it 
is because He is so awful and so dear that you will not 
do the sin which tempts you. 

2. I pass on to speak about another of the emergen- 
cies of life in which it makes vast difi'erence whether the 



278 HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

soul looks to the hills for help or to the valleys. Not 
merely in temptation but in sorrow a man may seek the 
assistance of the highest, or of some other power which 
is far lower. What does it mean when, the blow of some 
great grief having fallen on a man, his friends gather 
round him and dwell upon the blessed relief that time 
will bring him ? Nay, the man speaks to his own heart 
and says : " Let me drag on awhile and time will help 
me. It will not be so bad when the days have made 
me used to it. Let me live on and the burden will 
grow lighter." As these words are often said, they are 
unutterably sad and dreadful. If they mean anything 
distinct, they mean that by and by the poor man will 
forget. The face he misses now will grow more dim 
before his memory. The sweet music of the days that 
he has lost will grow fainter and fainter in the distance. 
How terrible that comfort is. How the true soul cries 
out against it : *' I do not want relief which comes by 
forgetting. I will not seek comfort in the thought that 
my affection is too feeble and brutish to keep its vivid- 
ness forever. Let me remember forever, even thouoh 
everlasting memory only means everlasting pain. You 
add a new pang to my sorrow when you tell me that 
some day I shall escape it by forgetfulness." That is 
the cry of every noble soul. And no less does it break 
out in remonstrance when the other relief, the relief oi 
distraction, is offered to it. " Come, busy yourself in 
some absorbing occupation, take some exacting work or 
some fascinating pleasure, and so your pain shall lose its 
hold on you." That is only the same thing in another 
form. That is only offering the man escape by a side 
door instead of by the far off gate through which the 



I 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 279 

other offer promised him that he should some day go 
forth into forgetfulness of his grief. No wonder that 
the heart, with such relief set before it, grows jealous of 
the proffered distraction and morbidly shuts itself in 
upon its sorrow and will have nothing to do with those 
occupations which it is told are to dissolve and melt 
away the pain which, with all its painfulness, still has 
at its heart the preciousness of love. All this is look- 
ing to the valleys and the depths for comfort. " I will 
lift up mine eyes unto the hills," says David. By and 
by the soul, vexed and distressed by its poor comforters, 
turns away from them. They have bid it avoid its grief, 
and the very horror which their advice has brought has 
shown the soul where its real relief must lie. It must 
be somewhere in the grief that the help of the grief is 
hidden. It must be in some discovery of the divine side 
of the sorrow that the consolation of the sorrow will be 
found. It is a wondrous change when a man stops ask- 
ing of his distress, " How can I throw this off ? " and 
asks instead, "What did God mean by sending this V 
Then, he may well believe that time and work will help 
him. Time, with its necessary calming of the first wild 
surface-tumult, will let him look deeper and ever deeper 
into the divine purpose of the sorrow, will let its deep- 
est and most precious meanings gradually come forth so 
that he may see them. AYork, done in the sorrow, will 
bring him into ever new relations to the God in whom 
alone the full interpretation and relief of the sorrow lies. 
Time and work, not as means of escape from distress but 
as the hands in which distress shall be turned hither 
and thither that the light of God may freely play upon 
it ; time and work so acting as servants of God, not as 



280 HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

substitutes for God, are full of unspeakably precious 
ministries to the suflering soul. But the real relief, the 
only final comfort, is God ; and He relieves the soul always 
in its suffering, not from its suffering ; nay, he relieves 
the soul by its suffering, by the new knowledge and pos- 
session of Himself which could come only through that 
atmosphere of pain. 

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance 
to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it 
has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the 
man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he re- 
sorts to mere expedients and tricks, the opportunity is 
lost. He comes out no richer nor greater ; nay, he comes 
out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But if he turns 
to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his 
life. Opportunity opens before him as the ocean opens 
before one who sails out of a river. Men have done the 
best and worst, the noblest and the basest things the 
world has seen, under the pressure of excessive pain. 
Everything depended on whether they looked to the 
depths or to the hills for help. 

3. Again, our truth is nowhere more true than in the 
next region where we watch its application, the region 
of doubt and perplexity of mind. A man is uncertain 
what is true, what he ought to believe, especially about 
religion, the most important of all subjects, and, as he 
thinks sometimes, the most uncertain as it is the most 
important. He wants help. He wants some power to 
lead him into certainty. Where shall he turn ? At 
once the lower resource presents itself on every side. He 
is offered authority. Close by his side starts up some 
man, some church, which says, " I have the truth. It 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 281 

has been given to me to tell to you. Believe what 
I declare simply as I declare it and your doubt is 
gone. The trouble is all over." It seems an easy thing 
to do. Nothing is stranger than the satisfied way in 
which men who, on every other subject, use their own 
minds and seek the truth by its own proper methods, 
here in religion only seem to ask that some one shall 
speak with overwhelming positiveness and they will be- 
lieve him. Indeed here, in religion, men seem to bring 
forth their most wanton credulity and their most wanton 
scepticism. Here, in religion, is where you can find men 
believing without any evidence at all ; and, again, disbe- 
lieving against all the evidence which the nature of the 
case admits. A very large part of the power of the 
Church of Eome to-day comes simply here, that men, 
"* bewildered and perplexed, demand an infallible author- 
ity upon religious things ; and since the Church of 
Eome stands forth the loudest and most confident and 
most splendid claimant of infallibility, they give them- 
selves to her. It is not that they have convinced them- 
selves that she is infallible. It is rather that she alone 
really claims to be; and they have started with the 
assumption that an infallible authority they must have, 
and here is the only one that offers. Now of such an 
escape from doubt as that what shall we say ? The 
deepest, truest thing that we can say about it is that it 
is not a real escape, because that into which it brings 
the soul is not really and properly belief. "What 
should we think," says a wise writer, " of any man who 
knew Euclid, but only accepted the demonstrations on 
the authority of the book?" He who holds a truth of 
religion, not because he himself has found it to be true 



282 HELP FEOM THE HILLS. 

but because some trusted friend here by his side, or 
some great father in the ancient church, or some council 
which voted on it once, has told him it is true, does not 
really and properly hold the truth. He has no more 
escaped from doubt than you have escaped the rain when 
you have crept under some other man's umbrella who 
for the moment is going your way, but who may any 
moment turn aside, and wdrose umbrella in the mean time 
is not big enough for two. 

And, beside this, even if the condition which is reached 
by pure submission to authority could properly be called 
faith, it would still be weak by the lack of all that per- 
sonal effort after truth, that struggle to be serious and 
fair, that athletic, patient, self-denying life which is the 
subjective element of faith; as true and necessary a part 
of the full act as is the acceptance of any most perfectly 
proved objective truth. No ; he who looks to authority 
for his religion is not lifting up his eyes unto the hills. 
That comes only when a seeker after truth dares to be- 
lieve that God Himself sends to every one of His chil- 
dren the truth which that child needs ; that while God 
uses the Bible, the church, and the experience of other 
souls as channels for His teaching, He Himself is alw^ays 
behind them all as the great teacher and the final source 
of truth ; that He bids each child in His family use the 
powers which belong distin^^ely to him, and apprehend 
truth in that special form in wdiich the Father chooses 
to send it into his life. It is this directness of rela- 
tionship to God, it is this appeal of the life directly to 
Him, it is this certainty that no authority on earth is so 
sacred but that every soul may — nay, that every soul 
must — judge of its teachings by its own God-given facul- 



HELP FKOM THE HILLS. 283 

ties enlightened and purified by devout consecration to 
God ; it is this which makes the true experience of faith. 
What comes to the soul in such an experience is not 
infallible certainty on all the articles on which man 
craves enlightenment, but it is something better. It 
is an hourly communion with the Lord of truth. It is 
a constant anxiety to turn the truth which He has 
already shown into obedience, and a constant eagerness 
to see what new truth He may be making known. It is 
a thorough truthfulness. I beg you, my dear friends, 
not to believe, because of the supposed need of infallible 
certainty in all religious questions, that therefore religion 
is a matter of authority. There is no authority short of 
God. Look up to Him. Expect His teaching. And 
though between you and the hill-tops clouds of uncer- 
tainty may come, never let them make you turn your 
eyes away in discouragement, or think that on the earth 
you can find that guidance which is not a thing of 
earth but which must come to us from heaven. 

4. I want to speak in very few words of only one 
more application of our truth. It is with reference to 
man's escape from sin. There is a need of help which, 
when any soul has once felt it, seems to surpass all 
others. " What shall become of the wickedness that I 
have done ? How shall I cast my sin away and be once 
more as if I had not sinned ? " And then there always 
have stood up, there always will stand up, two answers. 
One answer says, " God will forgive your sin. He will 
remit its penalties. He will not punish you. In view 
of this or that persuasion every penalty of sin is lifted 
off and you are free." The other answer says, " You 
cannot be wholly free from sin till you cease to be sinful 



284 HELP FROM THE HILLS. 

No taking away of penalties can free you. You must 
be another creature. God will give you a new heart if 
you will be obedient to Him. Every release from punish- 
ment has value only as it wins your grateful soul for 
Him who pardons you and makes you ready to receive 
the new heart which He has to give." No doubt both 
answers have their truth. But no doubt also, the second 
answer promises a more divine and perfect mercy than 
tlie first. The help of transformation is a loftier benefit 
than the help of remission. I can picture to myself the 
first without the second. I can image a soul with all 
its penalties removed, but yet not saved. I cannot pic- 
ture to myself the second without the first. I cannot 
imagine a soul in any region of God's universe, turned 
from its wickedness and made holy by His grace and 
yet bearing still the spiritual penalties of the sins which 
it committed long^ aero. Therefore it is that the best 
spiritual ambition seeks directly holiness. It seeks 
pardon as a means to holiness. So it lifts its eyes up 
at once to the very highest hills. I wish that I could 
make the thoughtful men, especially the young men 
who are just deep in perplexity about Christianity, see 
this. You must not think of Christ's redemption as a 
great scheme to save you from the punishment of sin. 
That is too negative. That is 'too low. It is the great 
opening of the celestial possibilities of man. Expect to 
escape, know that you can escape, from the consequences 
of having been wicked, only by being good. Crave the 
most perfect mercy. Ask for the new life as the only 
real release from death. So only can your religion glow 
with enthusiasm and open into endless hope. 



HELP FROM THE HILLS. 285 

In these four illustrations then I have tried to en- 
force the message that I wanted to bring. for that 
spirit which is content with nothing less or lower than 
the highest help. To turn in temptation directly to the 
power of God ; to cry out in sorrow for God's company ; 
to be satisfied in doubt with nothing short of the as- 
surance that God gives ; to know that there is no real 
escape from sin except in being made holy by God's 
holiness, — these are what make the man's complete 
. salvation. I turn to Jesus, and in all His human life 
there seems to me nothing more divine than the in- 
stinctive and unerring way in which He always reached 
up to the highest, and refused to be satisfied with any 
lower help. In the desert the Devil offered Him bread, 
good wholesome bread. Apparently He could have had 
it if He would ; but He replied, " Man shall not live by 
bread alone but by the word of God." At Jacob's well 
His disciples brought Him food and said, " Master, eat ; " 
but He answered, " I have meat to eat which ye know 
not of My meat is to do the will of Him that sent 
Me." On the cross they held up to Him the sponge full 
of vinegar ; but the thirst that was in Him demanded 
a deeper satisfaction, and He gave His soul to His Father 
and finished His obedient work. So it was everywhere 
with Him. The souls beside Him found their helps 
and satisfactions in the superficial things of earth. 
They laid hold on petty distractions, outside ceremonies, 
superficial assurances, and so seemed to forget their cares 
and questionings. He could not rest anywhere till He 
had found God His Father, and laid the burden which 
was crushing Him, into the bosom of the eternal strength 
and the exhaustless love. 



286 HELP FEOM THE HILLS. 

It is your privilege and mine, as children of God, to 
be satisfied with no help but the help of the highest. 
When we are content to seek strength or comfort or 
truth or salvation from any hand short of God's, we are 
disowning our childhood and dishonoring our Father. 

It is better to be restless and unsatisfied than to find 
rest and satisfaction in anything lower than the highest. 
But we need not be restless or unsatisfied. There is a 
rest in expectation, a satisfaction in the assurance that 
the highest belongs to us though we have not reached it. 
yet. That rest in expectation we may all have now 
if we believe in God and know we are His children. 
Every taste of Him that we have ever had becomes a 
prophecy of His perfect giving of Himself to us. It is 
as when a pool lies far up in the dry rocks, and hears 
the tide and knows that her refreshment and replenish- 
ing is coming. How patient she is. The other pools 
nearer the shore catch the sea first, and she hears 
them leaping and laughing, but she waits patiently. 
She knows the tide will not turn back till it has reached 
her. And by and by the blessed moment comes. The 
last ridge of rock is overwashed. The stream pours in ; 
at first a trickling thread sent only at the supreme 
effort of the largest wave ; but by and by the great 
sea in its fulness. It gives the waiting pool itself and 
she is satisfied. So it will certainly be with us if we 
\vait for the Lord, however He delays, and refuse to let 
ourselves be satisfied with any supply but Him. 



XVII. 

THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 

'* Curse ye Meroz, saitli the angel of the Lord, Curse ye bitterly the 
inhabitauts thereof ; because they came not to the help of the Lord, 
to the help of the Lord against the mighty." — Judges v. 23. 

Deborah and Barak had gained a great victory in 
the plain of Esdraelon and along the skirts of the moun- 
tain of Little Hermon. Their enemy Sisera had fled 
away completely routed, and the wild, fierce, strong 
w^oman who "judged Israel in those days," and the 
captain of the Israelitish army, sang a splendid proud 
song of triumph. In it they recount the tribes who had 
come up to their duty, who had shared the labor and 
the glory of the fight. And then, in the midst of the 
torrent of song there comes this other strain of fiery 
indignation. One town or village, Meroz, had hung 
back. Hidden away in some safe valley, it had heard 
the call which summoned every patriot, but it knew it 
was in no danger. It had felt the shock of battle on 
the other side of the hills, and nestled and hid itself 
only the more snugly. " Curse ye Meroz, saith the 
angel of the Lord; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants 
thereof, because they came not to the help of the Lord, 
to the help of the Lord against the mighty." It is a 
fierce vindictive strain. It bursts from the lips of an 
exalted furious woman. But it declares one of the 
most natural indio'nations of the human heart. 



288 THE CURSE OF MEEOZ. 

Meroz is gone. No record of it except this verse 
remains. The most ingenious and indefatigable ex- 
plorer cannot even guess where it once stood. But the 
curse remains ; the violent outburst of the contempt and 
anger which men feel who have fought and suffered and 
agonized, and then see other men who have the same 
interest in the result which they have, coming out cool 
and unwounded from their safe hiding places to take a 
part of the victory which they have done nothing to 
secure. Meroz stands for that. It sometimes happens 
that a man or a town passes completely away from the 
face of the earth and from the memory of men, and 
only leaves a name which stands as a sort of symbol or 
synonyme of some quality, some virtue or some vice, for- 
ever. So Meroz stands for the shirker ; for him who is 
willing to see other people fight the battles of life, while 
he simply comes in to take the spoils. No wonder 
Deborah and Barak were indignant. Their wounds 
Avere still aching; their people were dead and dying 
all around them ; and here was Meroz, idle and comfort- 
able, and yet, because she was part of the same country, 
sure to get the benefit of the great victory as much as 
any. 

It was not only personal anger. This cowardly and 
idle town had not come "to the help of the Lord." 
Deborah knew that the cause of Jehovah had been in 
terrible danger. It seemed as if it had only barely been 
saA^ed. She was filled with horror when she thought 
what would have been the consequences if it had been 
lost. And here sat this village, whose weight perhaps 
might have furnished just what was needed to turn the 
doubtful scale ; here it had sat through all the critical 



THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 289 

and dreadful day, looking on and doing nothing. It 
was all her passionate sense of the preciousness of God's 
government and the danger in which it had stood which 
burst from her lips when she cursed Meroz. 

There are many people always who are in the com- 
munity and in the world what Meroz was in Palestine. 
For there is an everlasting struggle going on against 
wickedness and wretchedness. It never ceases. It 
changes but it never ceases. It shifts from one place to 
another. It dies out in one form only to burst out in 
some other shape. It seems to flag sometimes as if the 
enemy were giving way, but it never really stops ; the 
endless struggle of all that is good in the world against 
the enemies of God, against sin and error and want and 
woe. And the strange and sad thought which comes 
upon our minds sometimes is of how few people after 
all are really heartily engaged in that struggle, how few 
have cast themselves into it with all their hearts, how 
many there are wdio stand apart and wish it well but 
never expose themselves for it nor do anything to 
help it. 

Look at the manifest forms in which men show their 
will to work for God and goodness. Those of you who 
have had any occasion to observe it know full well by 
what a very small number of persons the charitable and 
missionary works of the church and all operations which 
require public spirit in a community are carried on. If 
there is a reform to be urged ; if there is an abuse to be 
corrected in the administration of affairs ; if there is 
some oppressed and degraded class whose rights, which 
they cannot assert themselves, must be asserted for 
them ; if there is a palpable wrong done every day upon 

19 



290 THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 

our streets, — most of you know how very few are the 
people in this city, who, apart from any private interest 
in the matter, are looked to as likely to take any con- 
cern for the public good. The subscription papers 
which one sees passing about for public objects might 
almost as well be stereotyped as written, so constantly 
do they repeat the same limited list of well known 
names. 

These are superficial signs. But ask yourself again, 
How many of the people among us who are in the posi- 
tions of influence in various occupations, feel any kind 
of responsibility for the elevation of their occupation, 
feel any desire of making it a stronghold against the 
power of evil ? How many merchants feel that it be- 
longs to them to elevate the standards of trade ? How 
many teachers value their relation to the young because 
they have the chance to strengthen character against 
temptation ? How many men and women in social life 
care to develop the higher uses of society, making it 
the bulwark and the educator of men's purer, finer, 
deeper life ? Every occupation is capable of this pro- 
founder treatment, besides its mere treatment as a 
means of livelihood or of personal advancement. In 
every occupation there are some men who conceive of it 
so. How few they are ! How the mass of men who 
trade and teach and live their social life, never get be- 
yond the merely selfish thought about it all ! The lack 
of a sense of responsibility, the selfishness of life, is the 
great impression that is forced upon us constantly. 

It is so even in religion. To how many Christians 
does the religious life present itself in the enthusiastic 
and inspiring aspect of working and fighting for God ? 



THE CUESE OF MEROZ. 291 

How almost all Christians never get beyond the first 
thought of saving their own souls ! I think I am as 
ready as any man to understand the vast variety of 
forms under which self-devotion m.ay be shown, and not 
to impute selfishness to that which simply is not unsel- 
fish in certain special forms. But, making all broad 
allowances, I think there is nothing which so comes to 
impress a man as the way in which the vast majority 
of men hold back and, with no ill-will but all good 
wishes, let the interests of their fellow-men and of good- 
ness and of God take care of themselves. I should like 
to speak to-day of the curse of Meroz, the curse of use- 
lessness, the curse of shirking ; and I should rejoice in- 
deed if I could make any young man see how wretched 
it is and inspire him Avith some noble desire to do some 
of the work, to fight some of the enemies of God. 

Notice then first of all that the sin for which ]\leroz 
is cursed is pure inaction. There is no sign that its 
people gave any aid or comfort to the enemy. They 
merely did nothing. We hear so much about the dan- 
ger of wrong thinking and the danger of wrong doing. 
There is the other danger, of not doing right and not 
thinking^ rig^ht, of not doino; and not thinkino- at all. It 
is hard for many people to feel that there is danger and 
harm in that, the worst of harm and danger. And the 
trouble comes, I think, from the low condition of spirit- 
ual vitality, from the lack of emphasis and vigor in the 
whole conception of a man's own life. A man who is 
but half alive, a poor helpless invalid shut up in his 
room, hears the roar of human life going on past his 
windows, and it causes him no self-reproach that he 
is not in it, that he has no part or share in all this 



292 THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 

work. He does not expect it of himself He recog- 
nizes still the positive sins. He knows that he has 
no right to commit murder, or to forge, or to lie as he 
sits there. His helplessness has not released him from 
any of those obligations. But he does feel released 
from enterprise and activity. He is not called upon to 
do a well man's work. His task is only to keep himself 
alive. Now the spiritual and moral vitality of many 
men is low. What can revive it ? What can put 
strength and vigor into it ? There is a verse of St. John 
which, among many other things which it tells, tells this, 
I think. " He that hath the Son hath life," John says, 
" and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." 
That is a great declaration. It says that if a man takes 
Christ, that is to say if a man loves and serves Christ 
because Christ has redeemed him into the family of 
God, he really lives, vigor comes into him, responsibility 
lays hold upon him. The work of the world becomes 
his work. God's tasks become his tasks. The enemies of 
God become his enemies. This is the meaning;' of count- 
less passages which people make to mean so much shal- 
lower, so much smaller things. '' God sent His only 
begotten Son into the world that we might live through 
Him," John says again. When Christ has redeemed 
a man, and the man knows his redemption and wants 
to serve Christ in gratitude, then the invalidism of the 
soul is gone. The man lives all through and through, 
and wherever Christ needs him he is ready; which 
merely means that wherever there is any good work to 
be done, he does it. 

Now there are in all our cities, and this city has its 
full share of them, a great multitude of useless men. 



THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 293 

and of men perfectly contented in their uselessness. 
Many a man looks back upon his life, and save for the 
kindly offices which he has rendered to his immedi- 
ate associates, he cannot remember one useful thiug he 
ever did. He never stood up for a good cause. He 
never remonstrated against an evil. He never helped 
a bad man to be better. A merely useless man ! His 
life might drop out of the host to-morrow and none 
would miss a soldier from the ranks. No onset or de- 
fence would be the weaker for his going. I know not 
how he reconciles it to himself. It may be that the 
palsy of a fashionable education has been on him from 
his birth. Perhaps he grew up, as you perhaps are 
bringing up your children now, to think that because 
his life was plentifully provided against necessity, there- 
fore it was free from duty. There is nothing so piti- 
able as to see a boy in some self-indulgent household, 
who evidently came into the world with faculties to 
make him be, and make him enjoy being, a strong and 
helpful worker for God and man, having all chance and 
taste for using these faculties quietly, steadily crushed 
out of him by the constant pressure of a fashionable 
home. It is the child of God being slowly made into 
the man of the world. But however it came about, let 
us take the only too familiar phenomenon of the use- 
less man who excuses his uselessness, and let us see 
what are some of the various forms which his uselessness 
assumes. I shall speak of three ; cowardice, and false 
humility, and indolence. Let us see how dead they 
make a man ; and how the Son of God is the true life 
of all of them. 

1. The first source then of the uselessness of good men, 



294 THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 

or, if you please, of men who are not bad, is moral 
cowardice. Cowardice we call the most contemptible 
of vices. It is the one w^hose imputation we most in- 
dignantly resent. To be called a coward would make 
the blood boil in the veins of any of us. But the vice 
is wonderfully common. Nay, we often find ourselves 
wondering whether it is not universal, whether we are 
not all cowards somewhere in our nature. Physical 
cowardice all of us do not have. Indeed physical cow- 
ardice is rarer than we think. A war or a shipwreck 
always brings out our surprise when we see how many 
men there are that can march up to a battery, or stand 
and watch the water creep up the side of their ship to 
drown them, and never quail. But moral courage is an- 
other thing. To dare to do just what we know we ought 
to do, without being in the least hindered or distorted 
by the presence of men who we know will either hate 
or despise or ridicule us for what we are doing, that is 
rare indeed. Men think they have it till their test 
comes. Why, there is in this community ; nay, there is 
in this congregation to-day, an amount of right conviction 
which, if it were set free into right action by complete 
release from moral cowardice, would be felt through the 
land. A man is deeply assured of Christianity. He is 
trying to serve Christ. He is always trying to be spir- 
itual. If he can creep up at night and drive a spike 
into some cannon of infidelity or sin when no one sees 
him, there is something in his heart that makes him do 
it. He will give his anonymous dollar or thousand dol- 
lars to religious work. But he never stands out boldly 
on the , Lord's side, never declares himself a Christian 
and says that the work of his Master shall be the work 



THE CUESE OF MEROZ. 295 

of his life. Is it cowardice ? He says there is no man 
he is afraid of ; and there is none. The fear is concen- 
trated on no individual. But is there not a sense of 
hostile or contemptuous surroundings that lies like a 
chilling hand upon what ought to be the most exuber- 
ant and spontaneous utterance of life? Have not the 
long years of living in such an atmosphere enfeebled the 
power of the native will ? One sees it in old men con- 
tinually, the fear which keeps the best and most enthu- 
siastic hopes and wishes chained. One has but little 
expectation of the breaking of that chain in them. But 
it is sad to see those same chains fastening themselves 
on younger men. The mere boy feels them growing. He 
wants to be generous, pure, devoted, Christian. Every- 
thing urges him to put his life from the first upon the 
side of righteousness and Christ. And what hinders 
him ? He early learns to cloak it under various names, 
but the power itself is fear. Cowardice wrings the foul 
or profane word from the lips that hate it while they 
utter it. Cowardice stifles the manly and indignant re- 
buke at the piece of conventional and approved mean- 
ness of the college or the shop. Cowardice keeps the 
low standards of honor traditional and unbroken through 
generations of boys. Cowardice holds the young Chris- 
tian back from a frank acknowledgment of his Lord. 

It is easy to make an argument with such a moral 
cowardice. It is easy for the boy or man who finds that 
he is losing his best life out of fear of his fellows to 
reason with himself '' Come," he says to himself ; " I am 
failing of my duty, I am dishonoring my best convictions, 
I am living a lie ; and all because I am afraid of whom ? 
Of a boy or a man, or of a company of boys or men 



296 THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 

whom I cannot respect. I know that he whom I fear 
is mean and low in his judgments. He is wicked, and 
in his heart there is no doubt the misgiving of wicked- 
ness. He probably distrusts and only half believes in 
his own abuse or his own sneer. And yet I am afraid 
of him. And what am I afraid that he will do ? Why, 
either that he will detest me or ridicule me. Suppose 
he does. What is the value of these missiles ? Do I 
really care for his praise so much that to lose it would 
really give me pain ? And then am I not wTong in 
thinking that he cares enough about me to -w^aste uj)on 
me either his hate or his contempt ? Do I not over- 
estimate the space which I fill in his thoughts ? Am I 
not doing myself wrong in order that a man or a world 
may think well of me, which in reality never thinks of 
me at all ? " This is the argument which the conscious 
coward holds with himself It is unanswerable. It ought 
to break the chains instantly and set the coward free. A 
man ought to cast his fears to the winds when he comes 
to realize that he is fearing contemptible people, and 
fearing that they will do to him contemptible things 
which in all probability they will never care enough 
about him to do at all. That is what many a man does 
realize about his cowardice ; and does it set him free ? 
Almost never, I believe. Almost never is a man made 
independent and brave by having it proved to him that 
it is a foolish thing to be afraid. No, men do not escape 
from their cowardice so. Nothing except the inflow of 
a larger consecration which oversweeps and drowns their 
cowardice can really put it out of the way forever. 
Nothing but the knowledge of God's love, taking such 
possession of a man that his one wish and thought in 



THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 297 

life is to glorify and serve God, can liberate him from, 
because it makes him totally forget, his fear of man. " I 
will walk at liberty because I keep Thy commandments." 
O those great words of David ! What an everlastino* 
story they tell of the liberty that comes by lofty ser- 
vice. They tell of what you young people need to save 
you, at the very outset of your life, from cowardice. 
Not by despising men will you cease to fear them. 
People's w^orst slavery very often is to things and people 
that they despise. Only by loving God and fearing 
Him with that fear whose heart and soul is love ; only 
by letting Christ show God to you so that you must see 
Him ; only so shall you tread your cowardice under 
yom^ feet and be free for your best life. 

2. We must go on to the second of tlie causes of the 
uselessness of men who might be useful, which I called 
false humility. Humility is good wdien it stimulates, 
it is bad when it paralyzes, the active powers of a man. 
It may do either. We have noble examples of humility 
as a stimulus ; the sense of weakness making a man all 
the more ardent to use all the strength he has. But if 
conscious weakness causes a man to believe that it 
makes no difference whether he works or not, then his 
humility is his curse. Perhaps this was part of the 
trouble of Meroz. The little village in the hills, poor, 
insignificant perhaps, lay listening to the gathering of 
the tribes. She saw the signal fires and heard the sum- 
mons of the trumpet run through all the land. She 
knew the summons was for her as w^ell as all the rest. 
But who was she ? What could she do ? What strength 
could she add to the host ? What terror could she in- 
spire in the foe ? What would Barak care for her sup- 



298 THE CUESE OF MEROZ. 

port, or Sisera for her hostility ? So she lay still and 
let the battle fight itself through without her. Do you 
not recognize the picture ? Whenever men hide behind 
their conscious feebleness ; whenever, because they can 
do so little, they content themselves with doing nothing ; 
whenever the one-talented men stand with their napkins 
in their hands along the roadside of life, — there is 
Meroz over again. Once more the argument is clear 
enough ; as clear with humility as it is with cowardice. 
Listen, how clear it is ! You who say that you can 
do so little for any good cause that there is no use of 
your doing anything ; you can give so little that it is not 
worth while for you to give anything ; your word has 
so little weight that it need not be spoken for the Lord, 
— consider these things. Fh^st, what do you know about 
the uses of the Lord, of this great work which the Lord 
has to do ; what do you know of it that gives you the 
right to say that your power is little ? God may have 
some most critical use to put you to as soon as you de- 
clare yourself His servant. Men judge by the size of 
things ; God judges by their fitness. Two pieces of iron 
lie together on a shelf One is a great clumsy plough- 
share ; and the other is a delicate screw that is made to 
hold the finest joint of some subtle machinery in place. 
An ignorant boor comes up and takes the great piece 
and treasures it. The little piece he sees is little, and 
throws it away. Fitness is more than size. You can see 
something of your size ; but you can see almost nothing 
of your fitness until you understand all the wonderful 
manifold work that God has to do. It is a most wanton 
presumption and pride for any man to dare to be sure 
that there is not some very important and critical place 



THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 299 

which just he and no one else is made to fill. It is al- 
most as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to 
think you can do everything. The latter folly supposes 
that God exhausted Himself when He made you ; but 
the former supposes that God made a hopeless blunder 
when He made you, Avhich it is quite as impious for you 
to think. 

And remember, in the second place, what would happen 
if all the little people in the world held up their littleness 
like a shield before them as you hold up yours. Grant 
that you are as small as you think you are, you are the 
average size of moral and intellectual humanity. Let 
all the Merozes in the land be humble like you, and 
where shall be the army ? Only when men like you 
wake up and shake the paralysis of their humility away, 
shall we begin to see the dawn of that glorious millen- 
ium for which we sigh ; which will consist . not in the 
transformation of men into angels, nor in the coming 
forth of a few colossal men to be the patterns and the 
cliampions of life, but simply in each man, through the 
length and breadth of the great world, doing his best. 

Eemember, too, that such a humility as yours, the 
humility that enfeebles and disarms you, comes, if you 
get at its root, from an over-thought about yourself, an 
over-sense of your own personality, and so is close akin 
to pride. It has run all around the circle in its desire 
to escape from pride, and has almost got back to pride 
again. Now pride is the thickest and most blinding 
medium through which the human eye can look at any- 
thing. If your humility is not transparent but muddy, 
so that you see things not more clearly but less clearly 
because of it, you may be sure there is pride in it. O 



300 THE CUESE OF MEKOZ. 

my friends, there is a humility which some men are too 
humble to feel, a distrust of self which some men are 
too forgetful of self ever to experience. 

The argument, then, against allowing any sense of 
weakness to keep us from doing all that we can do, is 
perfectly conclusive. But, once again, does this argu- 
ment dispel the paralysis and set men free to work ? 
Almost never, I believe, again. Not by studying him- 
self, but by forgetting himself in the desire to serve 
his Lord, does a man exchange the false humility which 
crushes for the true humility which inspires. What has 
become of the self-distrust and shyness of that gentle 
scholar who has turned into a Boanerges of the truth ; 
or of that timid shrinking woman who goes unmoved 
through the hooting of a rabble to the stake ? Both 
have lost themselves in their Lord. Both have learned 
the love of Christ till that became the one fact of their 
existence ; and then the call of Him who loved them 
has drawn the soul out of all self-consciousness. They 
have forgotten themselves, forgotten even their humility, 
and are wholly His. And there is the door through 
which all morbid self-distrust, all the despair of con- 
scious weakness, must find escape. 

3. I shall not need to say much upon the third of the 
causes for men's shirking the duties and responsibilities 
of life. Not that it is not important, but that it is so 
. simple. It is mere indolence, mere laziness. Perhaps 
Meroz was not afraid. Perhaps she was not shy and 
self-distrustful. Perhaps she simply believed that the 
work of God would somehow get itself done without 
her, and so waited and waited and came not to the 
help of the Lord against the mighty. Ah, we are 



THE CURSE OF MEROZ. 301 

always giving elaborate and complicated accounts both 
of the virtues and the vices of our fellow-men which are 
really as simple and explicable as possible, as clear as day- 
light. A man does a good thing and we are not con- 
tent to say that he does it because he is a good man, but 
we must find strange obscure motives for it, some far-off 
policies and plans, some base root for this bright flower. 
Another man lets his duty, his clear duty, go undone, 
and again we set our ingenuity to work to guess why he 
does not do it. He misconceives his duty, he is too modest, 
he is waiting for something ; when the real trouble is in 
a simple gross laziness, a mere self-indulgent indolence, 
which makes him indifferent to duty altogether. Let 
me go back to the picture which I tried to draw at the 
beginning of this sermon ; a man who was born in lux- 
ury has lived in luxury, and now is coming on to middle 
life with the habits of his youth about him. He belongs 
to that strange, undefined, and yet distinct condition of 
life which is called society or fashion or respectability. 
That is a strange condition. It is not characterized by 
remarkable intelligence, not by peculiar education, not 
always by the most perfect breeding ; but the main thing 
about it is that over it there hovers a vague air of privi- 
lege. The men and women who live in it are not looked 
to by other people, and do not look to themselves, for 
the active energetic contributions to the labor of life. 
It does not furnish the w^orkers to the state or to the 
church. With this condition many of you are perfectly 
familiar. To it many of you belong, and feel its influ- 
ence. Nothing is expected of you, and you do nothing. 
A well-bred, good-natured selfishness fills up the life of 
such a man. Duty ? It seems as if he never had heard 



302 THE CUKSE OF MEKOZ. 

the word ; or as if he thought that it belonged, like those 
other two words, poverty and work, to beings of another 
arder from himself. Now is there any hope for such a 
man ? 0, if he were only a fancy sketch ! 0, if he were 
not real and actual all through the city ! 0, if there were 
not whole hosts of boys, wdth the capacity in them to be 
something better, who are growing up with him as the ob- 
ject of their admiration, and becoming year by year more 
and more like him ! Is there any hope of such a man 
coming to understand that it is not for such a life as he is 
living that God has made him ? I own the only chance I 
see is in his coming to understand, in some real sense and 
meaning of those w^ords, that God did make him. I think 
that is the real knowledge that is needed in our parlors 
and our clubs ; needed there, lacking there, often quite 
as much as in our drinkino^ saloons and dens of thieves. 
That a man's life is not an accident, that we are here 
because God put us here as the master mechanic puts 
each bolt and shaft of the engine into the place where 
it is wanted ; is not that the quickening, the transform- 
ing knowledge? That physical strength, those strong 
arms and nimble hands, are not accidents ; not an acci- 
dent, that quick perception and that power of endurance ; 
not an accident, that easy temper and careless acceptance 
of the things of life which might be elevated into faith. 
Let a man know this, and his sense of fitness- must be 
outraged every day as he hears the life, which he was 
made for, claiming him, and yet goes on in uselessness. 
But there is only one way to really know this deeply. 
The only way to really know that God made us is to 
let God remake, regenerate us. The only way to be 
sure that God gave us our physical life is to let Him 



THE CUESE OF MEROZ. 303 

give us the spiritual life which shall declare for the 
physical life an adequate and worthy purpose. The only 
way to realize that we are God's children is to let Christ 
lead us to our Father. That is the only permanent es- 
cape from indolence, from self-indulgence ; the grateful 
and obedient dedication to God through Christ which 
makes all good work, all self-sacrifice, a privilege and 
joy instead of a hardship, since it is done for Him. 

The curse of Meroz is the curse of uselessness ; and 
these are the sources out of which it comes — cowardice 
and false humility and indolence. They are the stones 
piled upon the sepulchres of vigor and energy and work 
for God, whose crushing weight cannot be computed. 
Who shall roll us away those stones ? Nothing can do 
it but the power of Christ. The manhood that is touched 
by Him rises into life. 1 have tried to show you what 
that means. my friends, it means this, that when a 
man has understood the life and cross of Jesus, and really 
knows that he is redeemed and saved, his soul leaps up 
in love and wants to serve its Savior ; and then he is 
afraid of nobody ; and however little his own strength 
is, he wants to give it all ; and the cords of his self-indul- 
gence snap like cobwebs. Then he enters the new life of 
usefulness. And what a chano-e it is ! To be workino- 
with God, however humbly ; to have part of that service 
which suns and stars, which angels and archangels, 
which strong and patient and holy men and women in 
all times have done ; to be, in some small corner of the 
field, stout and brave and at last triumphant in our 
fight with lust and cruelty and falsehood, with want or 
woe or ignorance, with unbelief and scorn, with any of 



304 THE CUESE OF MEEOZ. 

the enemies of God: to be distinctly on God's side, 
though the weight of the work we do may be utterly 
inappreciable, — what a change it is when a poor, 
selfish, cowardly, fastidious, idle human creature comes 
to this ! Blessed is he that cometh to the help of the 
Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty. There 
is no curse for him. No wounds that he can receive 
while he is fighting on that side can harm him. To 
fight there is itself to conquer, even though the victory 
comes through pain and deaths as it came to Him under 
whom we fight, the Captain of our Salvation, Jesus 
Christ. 



XVIIL 
THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 

A SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY. 
** Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment." — Psalm civ. 2. 

The Psalms of David have two different descriptions 
of the way in w^hich God offers Himself to the knowl- 
edge of man. They are both figurative. Each of them 
is drawn from one of the two great aspects in which the 
world of nature stands before men's eyes. They seem 
at first to be quite contradictory of one another. But, 
as so often is the case, the more we think of them the 
more we see that both are true, and going back to their 
meeting-point we find, lying there, the deepest and the 
fullest truth concerning God. In the "eighteenth Psalm 
David sings of God, "He made darkness His secret 
place ; His pavilion round about Him were dark water 
and thick clouds of the skies." And again in the nine- 
ty-seventh Psalm, " Clouds and darkness are round 
about Him." And then in this verse of the one hun- 
dred and fourth Psalm, which I have quoted for my 
text, '' Who coverest Thyself with light as with a gar- 
ment." Darkness and light ! The two opposites which 
divide the world ! The two foes which are in perpetual 
fight throughout all nature ! Behold they both are 
made the mediums of the utterance of God. " Darkness 

20 



306 THE MYSTEEY OF LIGHT. 

is round about Him ; " and yet He stands before tlie 
world, " clothed with light as with a garment." 

When we try to reach the ideas which are included 
in these two pictures, so as to see whether we can hold 
them both in our minds at once, the first thing of which 
we wish to be sure is that the difference between them 
is the difference not between mystery and no mystery, 
but between two kinds of mystery. It is not that the 
figure of the darkness presents to us a Being all obscure 
and hidden, whom no intelligence can understand, and 
then the figure of the light throws open all the closed 
doors of this Being s nature so that whoever will may 
enter in and understand Him through and through. 
God is forever mysterious to man. The infinite is for- 
ever infinitely past the comprehension of the finite. 
None but another God, the equal of Himself, could 
fathom what God is. He not merely does not, He can- 
not, make to us a revelation of Himself which shall 
uncover all the secrets of His life and leave us nothing 
for our wonder, nothing to elude us or bewilder us. 
What then ? What is it that He does do when He 
changes the figure of His presentation and, instead of 
standing before our awe-filled vision wrapped in the 
robes of darkness, stands forth radiant, " clothed with 
the light as with a garment ? " This is one of the 
questions which lie at the root of any true understand- 
ing of revelation ; one of the questions men's confusion 
with regard to which keeps their whole idea of revela- 
tion misty and confused ; one of the questions therefore 
which we want to answer as carefully and truly as we 
can. 

The answer to the question lies in the fact that there 



THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 307 

are two kinds of mystery, a mystery of darkness and a 
mystery of light. With the mystery of darkness we are 
familiar. Of the mystery of light we have not thought, 
perhaps, so much. Some object which we would like 
to study is hidden in obscurity. We cannot make out 
its shape or color. We strain our eyes, but it eludes 
us still. We know that the way it looks to us may be 
quite different from the reality. We know that the 
cloud is jealously hiding some of its features without 
the knowledge of which no man can truly say that he 
knows the object. We struggle with our ever baffled 
vision, saying all the time, " How mysterious ! '' "What 
a mystery it is ! " But now supposing that the object 
of our scrutiny, being something really rich and pro- 
found, were brought out of the darkness into a sudden 
flood of sunlight, would it grow less or more mysterious ? 
Suppose it is a jewel, and instead of having to strain 
your eyes to make out the outline of its shape, you can 
look now deep into its heart ; see depth opening beyond 
depth, until it looks as if there were no end to the 
chambers of splendor that are shut up in that little 
stone ; see flake after flake of luminous color floating up 
out of the unseen fountain which lies somewhere in the 
jewel's heart. Is the jewel less or more mysterious 
than it was when your sight had to struggle to see 
■whether it w^as a topaz or an emerald ? Suppose it is 
a landscape. One hour all its features are vague and 
dim in twilight ; hill, field, and stream in almost indis- 
tinguishable confusion. Six hours later the whole is 
glowing in the noonday sun, the streams burning with 
silvery light, the colors of the fresh spring hillsides 
striking from far away upon the senses, filling them w^th 



308 THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 

delight and wonder. Everything is thrilling and burst- 
ing with manifest life. Has not the mystery increased 
with the ascending sun ? Suppose it is a friend. A man 
about whom you have heard conflicting and bewildering 
accounts, whom you have been unable to make out as 
he stood off at a distance, has drawn near and touched 
your life. You have grown intimate with him. You 
have traced his ideas and actions back into his charac- 
ter. You have seen him on many sides, and out of 
many impressions the roundness and completeness of 
his nature has become clear to you. Is it not true that 
the more you see of him the more you wonder at him ? 
If you are worthy to see him and he is worthy to be 
seen, familiarity breeds not contempt but reverence. 
The more light there is upon the greatest and best men, 
the more mystery they show to their wondering fellows. 
There is no mystery of character to any man like that 
of his father and his mother, whom he has known all 
his life in the constant clear light of home. And so we 
might proceed with many illustrations. Is a great idea, 
a great study, a great cause, more deeply mysterious to 
the superficial or to the thorough student ? Was not 
the mystery of mathematical truth more truly mysteri- 
ous to Professor Peirce than it is to you or me ? Does 
not the mystery of color or the mystery of form grow 
more intense to Eaphael and Michael Angelo as they 
surpass the mere gazer of the galleries ? Africa looks 
mysterious to the mere tourist who sails into the harbor 
at Alexandria. Has it lost or deepened its mystery for 
Livingstone and Stanley when they have toiled up the 
long nameless rivers into the heart of the dark con- 
tinent ? 



THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 309 

This is the mj^stery of light. With all deep things the 
deeper light brings new mysteriousness. The mystery of 
light is the privilege and prerogative of the profoundest 
things. The shallow things are capable only of the mys- 
tery of darkness. Of that all things are capable. Noth- 
ing is so thin, so light, so small, that if you cover it with 
clouds and hide it in half-lights it will not seem mysteri- 
ous. But the most genuine and profound things you may 
bring forth into the fullest light, and let the sunshine 
bathe them through and through, and in them there will 
open ever new wonders of mysteriousness. The mys- 
tery of light belongs to them. And how then must it 
be with God, the Being of all beings, the Being who is 
Himself essential Being, out of whom all other beings 
spring and from whom they are continually fed ? Surely 
in Him the law which we have been tracing must find 
its consummation. Surely of Him it must be supremely 
true that the more we know of Him, the more He shows 
Himself to us, the more mysterious He must forever be. 
The mystery of light must be complete in Him. 

Shall the time ever come when God shall be so per- 
fectly understood by man that the mystery shall be gone 
out of His life, and man feel that he knows Him through 
and through and can tell his brother-man about Him ; 
as the father stands by the steam-engine and explains it 
to his boy, so that what used to be a beautiful wonder- 
ful thing which seemed almost alive, becomes only an 
ingenious arrangement of steel and iron, which the boy 
goes off to imitate in his workshop, making a little steam- 
engine which repeats the big one which he has been 
studying ? Shall the time ever come when man shall un- 
derstand God like that ? Men often talk as if such a 



310 THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 

time would come. Nay, men often talk as if such a 
time had come ; as if their theologies, their descrip- 
tions of God, had eliminated mystery from Deity and 
made the infinite perfectly intelligible to the finite. 
This is the danger which haunts the popular theology 
and often makes the devotional meeting and the relig- 
ious controversy and the revival hymn and the state- 
ment of religious experience very unpleasant and some- 
times very harmful. . Very many good people seem to 
think that in order to make God seem dear and capable 
of being loved and trusted by His children, they must 
make Him seem perfectly simple and comprehensible ; 
they must take away from the thought of Him all that 
is awful and mysterious ; as if awe and mystery were 
not essential elements in the highest loveliness ; as if 
our deepest and most trustful love were not always 
given to the things which are awful and mysterious to 
us ; the love of the little child for his father who em- 
bodies for him omniscience and omnipotence ; the love 
of the patriot for his country ; of the philanthropist for 
his race ; of the poet for nature. There w^as a time 
when men seemed to be so busy in wondering at God 
that they forgot to love Him. Sometimes now it seems 
as if they so longed to love Him that they dared not re- 
member how wonderful He is. When the full religion 
shall have come, men will know that the more wonder- 
ful they find Him to be, the more completely they may 
love Him ; and the more He gives Himself to their love, 
the more He will be wonderful to them forever. 

For to those who stand nearest to Him He is most 
mysterious. We talk with ready understanding of the 
death of Christ, before which the angels stand in awe. 



THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 311 

*^ No angel in the sky- 
Can fully bear that sight, 
But downward bends his wondering eye 
At mysteries so bright." 

Mysteries so bright ! Tlie more bright the more mys- 
terious ! Heaven is to be full of mystery. The nearer 
we stand to the Lamb upon His throne, the deeper depths 
we can discover in His majesty and love, the more won- 
derful shall He be to us forever. Eevelation — it is a 
most important thing to know — revelation is not the 
unveiling of God, but a changing of the veil that covers 
Him ; not the dissipation of mystery, but the transforma- 
tion of the mystery of darkness into the mystery of light. 
To the Pagan, God is mysterious because He is hidden 
in clouds, mysterious like the storm. To the Christian, 
God is mysterious because He is radiant with infinite 
truth, mysterious like the sun. 

I have dwelt long on this because I wanted to make 
it as clear as I could, and because it seems to me to be 
what w^e want first and most of all to remember when 
we are thinking of the New Testament revelation of 
God, which we call the doctrine of the Trinity. To us 
to whom that revelation seems to be clear, God stands 
forth in it with amazing light. Behold He who hid 
Himself in darkness has come forth into the region 
wliich our most dear affections and our loftiest thoughts 
keep forever flooded with brightness. He is our Father, 
our Brother, our Inspiring Friend. Father, Brother, 
Friend ! These are words of light. In the clear at- 
mosphere of the relations which those words represent 
our life is lived, our most familiar interests and hopes 
and occupations go their way, walk up and down, and do 



312 THE MYSTEEY OF LIGHT. 

their several business. When God then sheds around 
Himself the revelation of these three relationships, and 
declares Himself to be Father and Son and Spirit, it is 
surely a vast access of light. We know Him as we 
have not known Him before, while our whole knowl- 
edge of Him was wrapped up in the undefined, unopened 
majesty of that one name, God. And what then ? In 
the new light of this great revelation has the mystery 
of God grown less or greater ? Surely not less but 
greater. Nothing could be more misleading than for 
the believer or for the doubter of the doctrine of the 
Trinity to talk about that doctrine as if it claimed to be 
the solution, the dissipation, of the mystery of God. I 
say "God" to the religious heathen who has gone so 
far as to believe that there is one God and not many 
gods in the universe ; I say " God " to him and he 
gazes into the darkness of that great idea and says, " I 
do not know what God is ; I do not dare to ask. A 
million questions come buffeting me like bats out of the 
darkness the moment that I dare even to turn my face 
that way. Let me hear His commandments and go and 
do them. For Himself I dare not even ask what He 
is." That is the mystery of darkness. That is Moses 
on Mount Sinai. That is the Egyptian in the desert. 
That is the pure worshipper of the one unknown god- 
hood everywhere. Then I say " God " to the Christian 
and he looks up and says, " Yes, I know ; Father, Son, 
and Spirit ; my Father, my Brother, my inspiring Friend. 
I know Him, what He is, for He has shown Himself to 
me." But with each word. Father, Brother, Friend, 
there come flocking new questions, not like bats out of 
the darkness, but like sunbeams out of the light, bewil- 



THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 313 

dering the believing soul with guesses and insoluble 
suggestions and intangible visions of the love, the truth, 
the glory of God, which were impossible until this 
clothing by God of Himself with radiance in Christ had 
come. That is the mystery of light. That is St. John 
in Patmos. That is the Christian saint and thinker and 
questioner of all the ages standing before " the light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ." 

I am anxious to assert that the revelation of God in 
Jesus Christ is not the dissipation but the change, the 
transfiguration of mystery. The doctrine of the Trinity 
is not an easy, ready-made, satisfactory explanation 
of God, in which the inmost chambers of His life are 
unlocked and thrown wide open that whoso will may 
walk there and understand Him through and through. 
Often men's disappointment comes just here. The be- 
liever in the doctrine of the Trinity says, " I thought 
that with my acceptance of this truth all doubt, all 
questioning would be over. But lo ! the questions which 
I knew before were nothing to the questions that come 
flocking around me now. My heart is full of wonder. 
Christ, who reveals God to me, seems to escape me and 
elude me. The mystery of my religion is increased a 
hundredfold since God shone on me in the light of the 
gospel revelation." It is often an anxious and discour- 
aging discovery. There is a strange confused conscious- 
ness that all is right, and yet a haunting suspicion that 
something is wrong, when the humble, puzzled believer 
thus declares the perplexity of his faith. And on the 
other hand the doubter and denier of the Trinity de- 
clares, " See how simple my pure doctrine is, and how 



314 THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 

complicated and hard to understand your teaching 
makes the nature and life of God. It has lost sim- 
plicity and clearness." There is no answer to either of 
them, my friends, save the one great sufficient answer 
which lies in the truth of the mystery of light. There 
is a mystery concerning God to him who sees the rich- 
ness of the Divine life in the threefold unity of Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost, which no man feels to whom God 
does not seem to stand forth from the pages of his Tes- 
tament in that completeness. Not as the answer to a 
riddle, which leaves all things clear, but as the deeper 
sight of God, prolific with a thousand novel questions 
which were never known before, clothed in a wonder 
which only in that larger light displayed itself, offering 
new worlds for faith and reverence to wander in, — so 
must the N"ew Testament revelation, the truth of Father, 
Son, and Spirit, one perfect God, offer itself to man. 

The figure of our Psalmist's verse seems to me to be 
full of beauty and significance in connection with what 
I am now saying. " Thou coverest Thyself with light 
as with a garment," he cries to God. The garment at 
once hides and reveals the form it clothes. The man 
among men puts on the king's robe, and the purple 
which he wears at once declares his dignity and starts 
a hundred new questions concerning him. So when 
God tells us any new thing about Himself, that new 
revelation, that new light, is like a garment. It utters 
and it hides His majesty. Through it we see what He 
is ; and yet a hundred new questions about how He can 
be that, and what it means for us that He should be 
that, and what more which He must also be His being 
that involves^ come crowding on us. 



THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 315 

Think how it must have been in the disciples' inter- 
course with Jesus. Their earliest life with Him was 
very simple. They seemed to understand Him wholly. 
They thought that they knew perfectly what He was 
and what He had come to do. They learned to love 
Him dearly and intimately in this familiarity. Now 
and then in those first chapters of the gospels He says 
some deep word or does some unexpected action which 
seems to startle them and brings a puzzled question 
which is like the first drop before the tempest of puz- 
zled questions concerning Christ which has come since 
and which is still raging around us, but generally in 
those earliest days they have very few questions to ask ; 
they seem to understand Him easily. By and by, how- 
ever, to any one who reads the Gospels thoughtfully, 
there seems to come a gradual change. Jesus does 
not withdraw Himself from them. He comes nearer 
and nearer to them constantly. He tells them deeper 
and deeper truths about Himself. He opens remoter and 
remoter chambers of His history. "Before Abraham 
was, I am," He says. " I and my Father are one," He 
says. As He speaks, He is ever growing more and 
more wonderful to His simple-hearted followers. The 
love which they had given Him in those first bright 
transparent days is not taken back or lessened; it is 
ever deepening and increasing ; but it is also ever being 
filled with mystery and awe. By and by comes the 
night of the Passover with its abundant revelation. As 
we watch Jesus sitting there and telling the disciples 
truth after truth about Himself, what words like the 
old words of the Psalmist describe the scene, He is 
" clothing Himself with light as with a garment." We 



316 THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 

can seem to see the lustrous raiment of truth gathered 
about His familiar form, at once revealing it to, and 
hiding it from, His amazed disciples ; revealing it to 
their love, hiding it from their understanding. He 
grows dearer and more mysterious to them every, mo- 
ment as He speaks. Then comes Gethsemane, and 
then the Cross, and then the Eesurrection, and then the 
Pentecost. He, their Lord, is '' clothing Himself with 
light as with a garment," all tlie while ; more light and 
more mystery and withal more love perpetually, until 
at last the John who had once questioned Jesus as if 
He were a scribe or teacher, " Master, where dwellest 
Thou ? " is seen writing His reminiscence of it all in 
words that bum with mysterious reverence, words that 
make us think He wrote them on His knees. " The 
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we be- 
held His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the 
Father." 

Men sometimes shrink from following the disciples of 
Jesus in this developing apprehension and adoration of 
their Lord. There are some readers of the New Testa- 
ment who cling to its first chapters, and love to picture 
to themselves over and over again the scenes in which 
Christ, sitting on the mountain or wandering by the 
lake, talked like a gentle, noble master to the simple- 
hearted men who never dreamed of the majesty which 
they were dealing with. Before such readers the last 
deep chapters of St. John and the expanse of the epistles 
seem to stretch like a great ocean, over which hang 
thick clouds, from which come solemn sounds that dis- 
tress and frighten them, and on which they do not 
like to launch away. And yet the epistles are a true part 



THE MYSTEEY OF LIGHT. 317 

of the same revelation with the gospels. The fact is 
clear beyond all doubt that the disciples who had 
walked with Jesus by Gennesaret were the same dis- 
ciples who preached throughout Judea and far abroad 
the power of the Son of God, the mysterious salvation 
by the life and death of Christ, the crucified and risen 
Savior. Such change, beyond all doubt, came to those 
men as Jesus revealed Himself before them, as in their 
presence He clothed Himself with light as with a gar- 
ment. 

And is a progress such as theirs, a deepened knowl- 
edge of the mystery of Christ such as was given to them, 
possible for men to-day ? Indeed it is ! If there is any 
man or woman here this morning who has honored 
Jesus Christ, loved Him, believed Him, called Him the 
noblest of men, the perfect man perhaps ; and taken pride 
in the simplicity, the definiteness, the completeness of 
such a notionof Christ; pointed to it and said, "Behold 
how clear it is ; how free from all bewildering mystery ; " 
if there is any such Christian here to-day to whom it 
can be made known that absence of mystery may be a 
sign not of abundance but of lack of light, to whom then 
his Christ, his teacher, his model man, may open the 
depths of His life and manifest the higher natin^e on 
which the perfection of His humanity rested ; if there 
is any Christian who, ready and glad to see his Christ 
become more mysterious before his eyes as He robes 
Himself in fuller light, can take with joy the word of 
that Christ as He declares Himself the Son of God, to 
such a Christian the exact experience of the disciples 
may be repeated. Such repetitions are not rare. Con- 
tinually Christ, trusted in His humanity, is making 



318 THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 

known His divinity. It is the effort, the tendency, of 
His whole nature to do that if men will let Him, if only 
they do not, fascinated with the simplicity of His man- 
hood, refuse to go on and in into the deeper truth which 
He has to give them about Himself. 

I have dwelt to-day on this one point. I have tried 
to show that there is such a thing as a mystery of light, 
and what is its true nature. I have tried to show that 
if God shows man new and more profound truth regard- 
ing Himself the result will certainly be a deepened mys- 
teriousness and a growth of many questions too hard to 
answer ; and therefore that the fact that the doctrine of 
the Trinity is full of mystery and overruns with ques- 
tions before which the mind stands helpless, is not an 
objection to its truth, but is rather what man ought to 
look for in any revelation which proceeds from God. 

And now in one last word, dear friends, what will 
this be to us ? Only, I hope, a new encouragement to 
trust ourselves frankly and gladly to w^hatever revela- 
tion God may have to make to us. I am afraid that 
there are many Trinitarians who, in all their faith, are 
yet staggered and troubled because of its mysteriousness. 
I am afraid that there are many Unitarians who close 
their eyes to the deepest words of the New Testament 
because they too distrust. the presence of mystery in 
the conception of God. I am not pleading with you 
now to believe this or that concerning God, but only, 
without prejudice or prepossession, to be willing to be- 
lieve whatever He shall show you of Himself. Be sure 
that for such as we are to know such as God is must be 
for us to enter into a realm where mystery shall fill the 
air. Above all, be sure that it is only by completest 



THE MYSTERY OF LIGHT. 319 

willingness to know His completest truth that we can 
rightly know anything regarding His surpassing na- 
ture. 

With such convictions fastened in your souls, give 
yourselves, my friends, to Him. Ask Him to be your 
Savior. Ask Him to forgive your sins. Ask Him to 
take your sins out of you and make you pure. Ask 
Him to show you His holiness so that you shall love it 
and make it your own, growing holy like Him. Ask 
Him to save you in all the unknown wants of your 
poor broken life, where you are not even able now to 
know that you need salvation. Ask Him to do this and 
He will do it all. And as He does it, let yourself be- 
lieve, without a hesitation ; let yourself believe in the 
divinity of Him who alone could do so divine a work as 
the forgiveness and salvation of a soul. That is the only 
way in which men ever come really and truly to believe 
in the divinity of Jesus Christ. 



XIX. 

THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

*' Behold, He smote the rock, that the waters gushed out, and the 
streams overflowed. Can He give bread also ? Can He give flesh for His 
people ? " — Psalm Ixxviii. 20. 

, Belief in God is such a large action of our human 
nature, and appears in such a multitude of ways, that 
unbelief also, its opposite, must have many forms. God 
is so vast, and for man to lay hold on Him is so complete 
an action, that it is no wonder if that hold may fail at 
any one of many points ; and no two unbelievers, as no 
two believers, can be perfectly alike. In the Psalm from 
which I take my text the singer is telling the old story 
of the national history of the Jews. All the escape 
from Egypt and the journey through the desert is re- 
counted ; and in this twentieth verse the peevish and 
complaining Israelites are heard in the wilderness, 
doubting whether God, although he had done much for 
them, can still supply the new needs which are coming 
into sight. ''Yea they spake against God; they said, 
Can God furnish a table in the wilderness ? " And then — 
to quote the Prayer Book version of the Psalm — '' He 
smote the stony rock indeed that the water gushed out 
and the streams flowed withal ; but can He give bread also, 
or provide flesh for His people ? " You see what kind 
of unbelief is here. It does not deny the past fact. It 
acknowledges that God has done one miracle of mercy. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 321 

But in that miracle it finds no such revelation of God 
Himself and His perpetual character and love as gives 
assurance that He will again be powerful and merciful. 
These Israelites have no accumulated faith. They are 
just where they were before the last miracle relieved 
them. That miracle stands wholly by itself. It does 
not promise or imply another. The old bright scene 
comes up before them ; the sparkling water tumbling out 
of the hard, sunburnt stone. They revel in the recollec- 
tion ; but then they turn back to their present hunger, 
and the chance of bread and flesh seems only the more 
desperate because of the mocking and tantalizing re- 
membrance of the water from the rock. 

The power of accumulation of life differs extremely 
in different men. Some men gather living force, Avisdom, 
faith, out of every experience. Other men leave the 
whole experience behind them and carry out with them 
nothing but the barren recollection of it. And the dif- 
ference, when we examine it, depends on this; on whether 
the man has any conception of a continuous unbroken 
principle or personal association running through life, 
and bringing out of each experience its soul and essence 
to be perpetually kept. It is something like this. Two 
fields of wholly different soils lie side by side. Neither 
is mingled w^ith the other. The traveller who simply 
tramps across them leaves one behind him as he climbs 
the stile and enters on the other as a w^hoUy new expe- 
rience. But let a stream flow through them and it binds 
their life together. It takes the essence out of the soil 
of the first and mixes it with the soil of the second. 
The second not merely remembers the first as something 
that lies next to it, something that it has seen across 

21 



322 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

the wall. It receives that first field into itself and mod- 
ifies its own life by its presence through the ministry of 
that stream, which is common to them both. Now so 
it is, it seems to me, with some event of your earlier life. 
You look back to something which happened to you or 
which you did when you were fifteen years old. That 
event may be to you to-day a mere recollection, merely 
a relic which stays in your memory; or it may be the 
source of a power which pervades your life. What will 
decide which it shall be? Will it not depend upon 
whether you understand that event and see in it the 
exhibition of principles in whose power you are still 
living ; or whether it is merely an accident, unintelligible, 
with no perceptible cause, with no reasonable explana- 
tion ? A living principle, a deep continuous conviction 
of the meaning of life, is the stream that makes the new 
fields gather and keep the richness of the old. Suppose 
you had a sickness ten years ago. If you understand 
what it was that cured you, then the memory of that 
sickness is a power, and you see a new sickness of the 
same sort coming with less fear. Suppose you escaped 
in some great business crisis five years ago. If your 
escape seems to you a lucky accident, you tremble when 
you see a new business crisis coming, for it is not 
likely that such a lucky accident can happen twice. " I 
escaped once," you say ; " but I cannot hope to get off 
safe again." But if you know how you escaped; if 
that old struggle was to you a revelation of great per- 
petual principles that rule the business world and which, 
as a new need of them occurs, come back to you famil- 
iarly, then the old recollection is a power. Filled with 
its inspiration you go on bravely to meet the now intel- 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 323 

ligible danger. Or if you are a public man, and it seems 
to you nothing but a series of happy chances that the 
country has thus far weathered the storms and kept 
off the rocks that have beset her voyage through the 
century, then no wonder that you look forward with 
dread and feel that it is only a question of time how soon 
she goes to pieces. But if you have studied your coun- 
try's past history deeply and wisely enough to see that 
in every emergency it has been her essential principles 
that have saved her, then you are able to look all com- 
ing dangers in the face and devote yourself not to plan- 
ning how you and your fellow voyagers can be saved 
from the wreck when the ship has gone to ruin ; but 
liow the ship can be kept most purely and directly in 
the power of those first essential principles on which 
her safety in any emergency must rely and which, if 
they can have free play, will always save her. 

Let these be illustrations, and now turn and think of 
God. He is the great first principle. He is the under- 
power, the abiding base and background of our human 
life. His will, uttering His nature, is the stream that 
flows from field to field of our existence and binds them 
all together. The things that have to do with Him must 
have to do with one another. Now, once again, some- 
thing came to you twenty years ago, something very 
rich and beautiful, something which has made life bright 
and wonderful ever since. It may have been your birth; 
perhaps you are only twenty years old. Life began for 
you twenty years back. It may have been a great affec- 
tion. It may have been a great new truth. It may 
have been the sight of a character which revealed the 
possibilities of humanity to you. Whatever it was, the 



324 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

great question about that acquisition to-day is, Do you 
indeed know that God gave it to you ? As you feel it, 
do you feel, down through it, God ? Does it reveal, has 
it all along through these years been revealing, God to 
you ? You know that I mean something more by this 
than merely whether you have learned to say piously 
about it, " It is God's gift." I mean this, Has its value 
for you become lodged in this, that it is a token of God's 
love for you and a revelation of His nature ; just as the 
picture on your walls, which a friend gave you years 
ago, shines with the perpetrual brightness of his kindness 
and his taste. The Jews, you know, in our verse said, 
" He," that is God, " He smote the stony rock indeed, and 
the water gushed out;" but really they did not com- 
pletely know and believe that He, that God, had done 
it. They did not know and believe it so that with the 
memory of it GoD came up in their remembrance and 
filled their life. If that had been, they could not have 
asked any question about any future manifestation of 
His power. This is the question then, Does the joy of 
living v/hich makes you rejoice that 3^ou were born ; 
does the joy of thinking, the joy of honoring your 
humanity as some great man exhibits it to you ; does 
each of these joys reveal G-od to you? If it does, it 
becomes a fountain of faith. If it does not, it be- 
comes only a beautiful memory. There is all that 
difference. It is the difference between a thicket of 
ferns lovely with their exquisite leafage, and another 
thicket up into which gushes and wells perpetually the 
cool water from the exhaustless cisterns underneath for 
the refreshment of thirsty men. 

The unbelief then of which we have to speak is one 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 325 

which so fails to find in the past events of life a revela- 
tion of God, that those past events have no strength or 
divine assurance to give to the new problems and emer- 
gencies of life as they arise. This kind of unbelief, I 
think we shall see, is very constant. See how it comes 
in to break up the unity of life. A boy passes through 
his boyhood. It is full of happiness and a boy's healthy 
pleasure. Happy at home, happy in the playground, 
happy at school, those bright and breezy years slip by. 
When they are gone the boy stands on the brink of 
manhood and looks over into the untrodden years. Are 
the problems, the difficulties, the temptations which he 
sees there, just what they would be if he had not already 
passed through boyhood ? Certainly not, if boyhood has 
given him anything of a real faith in God. Certainly 
not, if all these happinesses wdiich have come to him 
are recognized as God's gifts, and if through the gifts he 
has known God the Giver. Then, though he must leave 
the gifts behind, he carries the Giver w^ith him into the 
manhood that he is entering. That is the true unity of 
life. It is the unity of a long journey in which, though 
the quick railroad is constantly compelling you to leave 
each new scene behind you, the wise kind company of 
the friend whom you are travelling wdth, and who in 
each new scene has had the chance to show you some- 
thing new of his wisdom and kindness, has been contin- 
ually with you and bound the long journey into a unit. 
This is the sort of life that Wordsworth was imagining 
when he sang : — 

** The child is father of the man ; 
And I could wish m)^ days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety." 



326 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH, 

We can see how this must come when underneath 
the habits of any period of life we recognize and find 
the revelation of God. The habits are rigid, uniform 
and untransferable. But God is infinitely various. His 
great arms can hold the infant like a mother, and build 
a strong wall about the mature man who is fighting the 
noonday fight of life, and lay the bridge of sunset over 
which the old man's feet may walk serenely into the 
eternal day. If the issue of any period of life is merely 
certain habits, we must lay them aside as we go on. If 
the issue of any period of life is a certainty of God, that 
we may freely carry over for the enrichment of the new ; 
just as the clothes which you wore when you were a boy 
you have outgrown, but the health which filled you then 
is in you now. 

And this is so not merely as one passes from youth to 
age, but also as one sees any new occupation or duty 
opening before him. You have been in one business 
and you are going into another. You have weighed all 
the chances. You have used all the discretion and judg- 
ment that you possess. You believe that you are fit for 
the larger work. And yet, as you sit thinking it over 
the night before the new shop is to be opened and the 
new advertisement is to stand in the papers, you are full 
of your misgivings. Shall I succeed ? Am I not leav- 
ing a certainty for an uncertainty ? I know that God 
has prospered me thus far, but will He, can He, help me 
here ? And then, just in proportion to the purity and 
absoluteness of your confidence that it has really been 
God who has helped you, and the simplicity and com- 
pleteness with which you resolve that, in the new busi- 
ness as in the old, you will be His obedient servant and 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 327 

put no obstacle in the way of His helping you still, just 
in proportion to your faith and consecration, will be the 
courage with which you see the dawn of the new day 
that is to bring to you the untried task. 

Take one step more. Suppose a human soul loofeng 
out into the mysterious and unrevealed experiences of 
the everlasting world. The window of death is wide 
open, and the shivering soul stands up before it and 
looks through and sees eternity. No wonder that it 
trembles. The warm, bright, familiar room of earthly 
life, where it has dwelt so long, lies there behind it ; and 
before it, outside the window, the vast, dim, path- 
less, unknown world of immortality. How shall the 
soul carry with it the sense of safety and assurance in 
God, which it has won within His earthly care, forth 
into this unknown, untrodden vastness whither it now 
must go? Only in one way; only by deepening as 
deeply as possible its assurance that it is God — not ac- 
cident, not its own ingenuity, not its brethren's kind- 
ness — that it is God who has made this earthly life so 
rich and happy. God is too vast, too infinite for earth. 
He is too vast for time, and needs eternity. Wrapped 
into Him the soul may be not merely resigned ; it may 
be even impatient to explore those larger regions where 
the power which has made itself known to it here shall 
be able to display to it all the completeness of its nature 
and its love. As the child of the sailor may wish to go 
to sea that he may see the father whom he believes in 
do his supreme work in fighting with the midnight hurri- 
cane ; as the child of the soldier may wish to see his 
father on the battle-field ; and the child of the statesman 
may wish to see his father in the senate ; so the child of 



328 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

God may wish for eternity, sure that there upon the 
vaster fields he shall see vaster exhibitions of that power 
and grace which he has learned completely to believe in 
here. 

And yet here, I think, if a man does really know that 
God is giving him more and more revelations of Him- 
self every day, increasing his faith by all the various 
treatments of his life, all that is necessary for him is 
that he should simply accept that constant growth in 
faith, rejoice each day in the new certainty of God which 
is being gathered and stored within him, and not look 
forward, not even ask himself how he will meet the 
large demands of death and immortality when they 
shall come. He may be sure that when they come 
this strength of faith which now is being stored within 
him will come forth abundantly equal to the need. So 
a soul need not even think of death if only life is filling 
it w^ith a profound and certain consciousness of God. 
The ship in the still river, while its builder is stowing 
and packing away the strength of oak and iron into her 
growing sides, knows nothing about the tempests of the 
mid- Atlantic ; but when she comes out there and the 
tempest smites her, she is ready. So shall we best be 
ready for eternity, and for death which is the entrance 
to eternity, not by thinking of either, but by letting life 
fill us with the faith of God. 

There is one great and perpetual illustration of the 
truth which we are studying in the history of the Chris- 
tian church and of religious thought. There the kind 
of unbelief of which I have spoken is continually coming 
out. It is often very strong in men who think them- 
selves supremely faithful, very champions of the faith. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 329 

The Christian church lives through one period of her 
career; she conquers tlie enemies that meet her there ; 
she makes the hard rock yield her water ; she keeps her- 
self alive and feeds her children. Then she passes on 
into another period with its new needs, its call for other 
methods and for other miracles ; and always there is a 
spirit in the church which trembles and has not learned, 
from the way in which God has cared for His church in 
the past, tha-t He, the same God, is able to take care of 
her in the future also. This is the fault of all retro- 
spective Christianity, of all Christianity which is anxious 
to abide in the old days, to fight over and over again 
the battles of the past, and to ignore or to avoid the 
modern battles, the special difficulties which the faith 
of Christ is called upon to meet in our own times. This 
is the fault of all the Christianity which is panic stricken 
before the enemies which it sees that faith in Christ 
must certainly be called upon to meet in the near future. 
I think I hear the voices of that panic from many quar- 
ters now. " He smote the stony rock indeed, and the 
water gushed out, but can He give bread also, and pro- 
vide flesh for His people ? " He answered the scep- 
ticism of the old centuries, but can He answer the 
subtler, finer sceptics of to-day ? He overcame the 
worldliness of the eighteenth century, but can He con- 
quer the materialism of the nineteenth ? He saved His 
church when she was persecuted with fire and the rack ; 
can He save her also when she is tempted with the 
corruptions of prosperity and fashion ? He stood by her 
in the days when Luther lifted up his voice for spiritual 
truth ; will He stand by her also now when it is evident 
that not Luther nor any other reformer has fathomed 



330 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

the truth of Christ completely, or brought the last mes- 
sage from the lips of God ? Will He stand by her still 
as she in all humility tries to learn yet more truth and, by 
an inevitable necessity, by a necessity that she cannot 
escape and must expect to encounter, meets in the at- 
tempt to learn profounder truth the danger of profounder 
error ? These are the questions that one hears. Accord- 
ing to the answers which men and churches give to them 
they go forward hopefully or go back timidly. The man 
who sees in all the history of the Christian church one 
great assurance that Christ is always with His people, 
and will always help any soul w^hich reverently and 
really wants to know deeper things concerning Him, 
and will lead it through many blunders and errors into 
truth, — that man goes forward. The man who sees in 
the history of the Christian church only the record that 
in the primitive ages, or in the reformation ages, Christ 
let His people see certain truths concerning Him and 
His ways, — that man goes back, lives in what seemed 
to him the finished revelation of those days, tries, by the 
imitation of their habits and the constant repetition of 
their phrases, to keep himself in their shadow ; deserts 
his own age, in which God seems to him to be less 
present and less real, and lives among dead issues in 
which he knows was once a living fire. But oh, if God 
is not really a living God in the world to-day, we have 
no God. How little it would be — nay, truly it would be 
nothing to you and me, called, driven as w^e are to meet 
the hard temptations, to answer the hard questions of 
this very present day — to know that once a God had 
answered other questions and made men conquerors over 
other temptations in other days. Only when all I read 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 331 

about that presence of His life among our human lives 
makes me know Him and, making me know Him, makes 
me absolutely certain that He is such that on to the very- 
end no servant of His can meet a temptation which He 
can help His servant to subdue and the help not be 
given ; no disciple of His can ask a question which it 
is possible for Him to answer and the answer be with- 
held ; only when the old history of all the Christian ages 
opens its heart to me and gives me an assurance such as 
this, only then have I attained to its true use and its 
richest blessing. With such a power as this, not merely 
the men of the past with whom I agree, but the men 
from whom I most profoundly dilfer, help me. It is not 
their opinions which I adopt ; it is their spirit ; it is the 
presence of God's Spirit in and with their spirits that 
makes me glad and hopeful. I may see, T do see, a hun- 
dred times, how it was that, even with God's Spirit in 
them, they came only to partial truth, to truth mixed 
and clouded with mistake. So while I am made hope- 
ful of God's presence, I am made also conscious of my 
own responsibility, and watchful over the condition of 
the mind into which I bid that Spirit welcome. Alas 
if it w^ere not so. Alas for us if we were compelled to 
assent to all the theology of Calvin or of Channing, be- 
fore we could thank Christ for the guidance which His 
Spirit gave both to Calvin and to Channing in their 
search for truth, and gather from it strong assurance 
that His spirit would help us too. Forever the past 
of the church is to us but a great curiosity-shop, into 
which we go to steal a bit of bric-a-brac which suits our 
fancy and which we can stick up incongruously in our 
modern homes, unless out of it all there issues one great 



332 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

assurance that Christ has always been with every soul 
which would receive Him ; in different ways according 
to each soul's circumstances and nature ; in different de- 
grees according to each soul's receptivity; but that always 
and everywhere He has given Himself to every soul that 
would receive Him and that therefore, if we will re- 
ceive Him, He will give Himself to us. When we 
gather from it that assurance, the past of the church 
becomes to us the fountain of strength and the oracle 
of truth. 

The Church is led into new ways of w^ork and wor- 
ship. The State adopts new policies. Society puts on 
new manners. Nay, even the Faith asserts her doc- 
trines in new forms. And yet in all of them there must 
be continuity and unity. The Church, the State, Soci- 
ety, the Faith, they are not perishing, and new churches, 
states, societies, faiths, taking their places every year. 
They are the same continuously. How can one know 
this and understand it ? Only by apprehending the 
spiritual power which is the soul of each, and seeing 
how that remains the same through everything. It is 
like the freedom which a workman gains when he has 
mastered the principles of the trade he is engaged in. 
So long as he is only familiar with its methods and its 
tools he is slavish and uniform. He cannot imagine 
the thing that he does being done in any but one way. 
Those who are doing his thing in other ways than his 
seem to him not to be doing it. But as soon as he has 
grasped its principle he is flexible and free. He values 
not the method but the thing ; and then there is true 
unity between him and all others who, in most distant 
times and places, are doing what it is the business of 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 333 

his life to do. Every man's business, whatever it be, 
becomes a liberal education to him just as soon and 
just as far as he lives not in its methods but in its prin- 
ciples. Now God is the principle which underlies all 
this business of human living. The methods of living 
are manifold. The principle of life is one. The man 
who lives in the methods loses the freedom and the 
unity of life. The man who lives in the principle, in 
loving, grateful, obedient communion with God, grows 
free with a divine liberty, and is a true brother of all 
the working children of God throughout the ages and 
throughout the world. 

In the few moments which remain, let me try to 
come close to your personal religious life and see how 
there the unbelief of which we have been speaking is 
always trying to creep in. You look back over the 
years in wdiich you have been trying to serve your 
Savior, and what do you see ? Many a temptation con- 
quered by His strength; many a sin forgiven and 
turned by gratitude for His forgiveness into an inspira- 
tion ; many a hard crisis where Christ your Lord has 
been all sufficient for you. Why is it that to-day, in 
your present temptation, in your present need, you feel 
so little sure of Him ? A new desert opening before 
you frightens you even while you remember wdtli thanks- 
giving how He led you through the old. The thanks- 
.giving dies away upon your lips for the past mercy as 
you come in sight of the new emergency for the brave 
meeting of which it w^ould seem as if that past mercy 
ought to have fitted you completely. " He smote the 
stony rock indeed, that the water gushed out and the 



334 THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 

streams flowed withal." There, as brightly as if you 
still were revelling in their refreshment, the fresh springs 
sparkle and sing before your recollection. " But/' and 
then you turn to the hunger and weariness that seem to 
be awaiting you ; " but, can He give bread also, or pro- 
vide flesh for His people ? " 0, to how many souls all 
that has come with a terrible surprise and disappoint- 
ment ! They thought that they \^ere ready for any- 
thing. They thought that out of all the rich blessing 
of the past they had gathered a strength that nothing 
could break down, a courage that nothing could dismay. 
But now they stand in front of the new temptation or 
the new pain and tremble like children, just as if they 
had never seen a temptation or a pain before. What 
does it mean ? It must mean that out of the old mercy 
they had not gathered God. They have come out of it 
with thankfulness for release, with soberness, with hope, 
with joy; but they have not brought a deep and abid- 
ing fellowship with Christy a firm, immovable confi- 
dence that they are His and He is theirs, to take with 
them into the midst of the new need which they have 
reached. If their terror, as the new trial comes, means 
anything more than that instinctive shrinking from 
pain which is part of our very physical humanity and 
which has no taint of spiritual weakness in it, this must 
be what it means. There is such a difference between 
coming out of sorrow thankful for relief, and coming 
out of sorrow full of sympathy with and trust in Him 
who has released us. Nine lepers hurry off to show 
themselves with their white skins to the priest. One 
leper only waits to cast himself at the feet of Jesus and 
worship Him. Tell me, will not those nine be different 



THE ACCUMULATION OF FAITH. 335 

from that one if ever a new disease should fall upon 
them all ? 

Let that one leper be the type of the soul to whom 
the whole blessedness of a blessing from Christ has 
come. Not only the health but the Healer he delights 
in. Not only the salvation but the Savior is his glory 
and his joy. Such souls there are. I know that some 
of yours are such; souls to which all the deliverances 
and the educations that have filled their past lives are 
precious, not merely for the safety and the instruction 
which they have brought, but far more for the personal 
knowledge of the Deliverer and the Teacher which has 
been won in them, and in whose strength the soul looks 
on and faces all that the future has to brino- without a 
fear. " He smote the stony rock and the water gushed 
out. Therefore I know He can give me bread and flesh ; 
He will give me bread and flesh if bread and flesh are 
what I ought to have." 

So to the soul that finds in all Kfe new and ever 
deeper knowledge of Christ, the Lord of Life, life is for- 
ever accumulating. Every passing event gets a noble 
value from the assurance that it gives us of God. This 
is the only real transfiguration of the dusty road, of the 
monotony and routine of living. It is all bright and 
beautiful if, in it all, God is giving us that certainty of 
Himself, by which we shall be fit to meet everything 
that we shall have to meet in this world and the world 
to come. 



XX. 

CHEISTIAN CHAEITY. 

" And there came a traveller unto the rich man; and he spared to take of 
his own flock and his own herd to dress for the wayfaring man that 
was come unto him." — 2 Samuel xii. 4. 

I WANT to speak to you this morning of the relations 
between the rich and the poor in onr city life ; and 
these verses from the Old Testament suggest, in the way 
in which the Old Testament always suggests the New, in 
the way of metaphor and parable, the full gospel truth 
at which I hope that we shall be able to arrive. 

The mixture of gold and clay of which our human 
nature is composed is nowhere so strikingly displayed 
as in the constant tendency of men to conceive lofty 
purposes and then to try to attain them by mean and 
sordid methods. We are so used to the sight of it, that 
we do not feel how strange it is. That a being should 
seek nothing noble, should live a brute's life through 
and through, that would be intelligible enough. That a - 
being should seek high things and then refuse to take 
any low ways to reach them, should rather give up the 
hope of reaching them at all than seek them by un- 
worthy ways ; that too would be intelligible. But that 
men should seek the very highest, earnestly, zealously, 
genuinely seek it, and yet make the method of their 
search consist in acts which contradict the very essen- 
tial ideas of that which they are seeking, this surely 



CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 337 

shows a strange condition of our human life. Men try- 
to get more close to God by hating, jjersecuting, mur- 
dering, God's children. Men try to convert their fellow- 
men to what they know is truth by arguments which 
they know just as well are lies. Men are captivated 
with the idea of self-denial, and then they invent in- 
genious ways to make self-denial comfortable and easy. 
The high impulse and the low self-indulgent method are 
both real, and this same confused and contradictory hu- 
manity of ours is able to contain them both. Men do 
not seem to know that, however bright and strong they 
frame the golden gallery of their ambition, the only 
chance of their getting up to it must be in the strength 
of the stairway which they build. They are always 
building steps of straw to climb to heights of gold. 

In this old story from the book of Samuel we have a 
picture of a hospitable man, a man who really wanted 
to help the poor traveller who came to him, but who 
wanted to help him with another man's property, to 
feed him on a neighbor's sheep. There is real charity 
in the impulse. There is essential meanness in the act. 
" He spared to take of his own flock and his own herd 
to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto 
him." Here is real kindliness and real selfishness in 
the same heart ; and not in struggle with one another 
but in most peaceful compromise. " I want to feed this 
guest of mine," the rich man says. " How fortunate 
that I am able to do it without encroachinor on myself, 
without taking of my own flock and my own herd." 
And by and by there sits the guest before the smoking 
feast, and the host's sheep are all heard safa and bleating 
through the open windows. 

22 



338 CHRISTIAN CHAEITY. 

I have said that this Old Testament story was a sort 
of parable of JSTew Testament truth. It might be more 
than that. It might be traced into almost literal appli- 
cation. No doubt in these our modern days we do pre- 
cisely what this strange mixed creature of the book of 
Samuel did. We feed the poor whom we pity on our 
neighbor's sheep. A great deal of our official charity, 
of our support of charitable societies which we urge 
other men to support while we are ready to disburse 
their riches with a patronizing condescension almost as 
if they were our own gift, comes very near the pattern 
of this ancient benefactor. But what I want most to 
speak of is not exactly that. There is what we may 
call perhaps a development, a refinement, of his self- 
deceptioD, which escapes its grossness and yet keeps and 
repeats its essential vice. There is a sense in which it 
may be said that a man meaning to be charitable, and 
perhaps freely bestowing his money on the poor, still 
spares to take of that which is most truly and intimately 
his own to give to the wayfaring men who are always 
coming to him in the complications of our life. It is 
this sort of self-indulgence into which, many most ex- 
cellent people are always falling ; and it is this which 
our best thought and our newest plans about charity are 
feeling very deeply must somehow be changed before 
the relations between the rich and the poor, between the 
householders and the wayfarers, can be what they ought 
to be in a Christian land. 

For one of the truths about the advancing culture of 
a human nature is that it is always deepening the idea 
of possession and making it more intimate. *' My own '' 
are always becoming more and more sacred words to 



CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 339 

growing men. What is your own ? In the crude *savage 
state, in the intellectual and spiritual childhood beyond 
which many men never get, it is your goods and chat- 
tels, your money and your houses and your clothes. 
They are your property. Then grow a little finer man, 
and what succeeds ? You come to certain habits, certain 
ways of life, the tokens and signs of certain privileges 
which you have enjoyed. These mark your deepened 
conception of your personality. You value yourself be- 
cause of these ; the manners of a gentleman, the habits 
of a man who has lived well and is well-bred. You look 
down on the rich man, however rich he be, who has not 
these. Mere wealth becomes to you only the garment 
which sets off the habits of your cultivated life, and 
which is yours only in the moderate sense in which the 
garment ever is the man's. He might lose it or cast it 
away, and yet still keep all himself. But by and by you 
become yet a profounder man. Below the habits of 
your life opens the world of thought and knowledge. 
Ideas take hold of you. You take hold of ideas. And 
when you have done that your ownership in them be- 
comes so real and vivid, they are so truly a part of your- 
self, so intimately and really yours, that it seems as if 
the previous ownerships had not deserved the name. 
Eiches are mere trinkets, and habits are mere tricks. Of 
neither will the man say unreservedly, " This is mine," 
who has found a new sacredness in those words as he 
has learned to use them of the truths which have be- 
come to him like very life. And then once more, when 
life still further deepens, when in the gradual attainment 
of character the man comes to count that his own w^hich 
he is, when to possess intrinsic qualities, to know him- 



340 CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 

self brave, patient, self-respectful, humble, pure, becomes 
the satisfaction of the soul, then are not all the previous 
notions of possession once again made slight? Even the 
knowledge which his mind has won will hardly seem to 
be truly his own to the man who has realized with what 
far more intimate ownership his whole nature has taken 
possession of a character. What w^e know is like some- 
thing lent to us, something that we may possibly forget, 
something that we may even throw away in fuller light. 
It is not ours forever like the thing we are, and which 
being it once we must be always through the eterni- 
ties, unless in some eternity we cease to be ourselves. 

These are the deepening degrees of ownership. You 
see how, as each one of them becomes real to a man, the 
previous ownerships get a kind of unreality. The sav- 
age owns his forest. The man of civilization owns his 
rich and complicated life, and his houses and fields are 
but the symbols of the higher life he has attained. The 
scholar, the thinker, has passed down and into a yet pro- 
founder property. He has come to that which no cir- 
cumstances, no man, can take away from him. And 
then the seeker after character, he whom in Bible phrase 
we call the " saint," has gone into the inmost chamber, 
and counts money and company and even knowdedge 
as only the means and assurances of the one thing which 
he really possesses, which is himself, his personal nature, 
his character. 

And now is it not clear that with this deepening of 
the idea of property, the idea of charity must deepen 
also ? I want to give a poor man what is mine. It is 
my duty and my wish to give. What shall I give him ? 
If I have got no farther into the idea of property than 



CHEISTIAN CHARITY. 341 

the first stage, I am satisfied when I have filled his empty 
hands with dollars. But if I have gone farther than 
that, I cannot be content till I have bestowed on him 
by personal care something of that which dollars repre- 
sent to me and without which they would be valueless, 
the noble and ennobling circumstances which civiliza- 
tion has gathered round my lot. But if I have gone 
deeper still and learned to count truth the one precious 
thing in all the world, I shall feel that I have " spared 
to take of my own " to give him, till I have at least tried 
to provide not merely for the body but for the mind. 
And then, to take once more the final step, as soon as I 
have come to think of character as the one only thing 
that I can really call my own, my conscience will not 
let me rest, I shall think all my benefaction an imper- 
fect, crippled thing, until I have touched the springs of 
character in him and made him the sharer of that which 
it is the purpose and joy of my life to try to be. 

I have dwelt long on this because I wanted to make 
clear the true philosophy of those convictions which have 
been growing stronger and stronger in the minds of chari- 
table people of late years, and which have recently found 
expression in the most intelligent and conscientious efforts 
for the relief of poverty. Evidently it is by these con- 
victions that all the best charity of the future is to be 
inspired. The sum of those convictions is that no relief 
of need is satisfactory, none meets the whole want of 
the needy man or answers the whole duty of the bene- 
factor, which stops short of at least the effort to inspire 
character, to make the poor man a true sharer in what 
is the real substance of the rich man's wealth. And at 
the bottom of this profounder conception of charity 



342 CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 

there must lie, as I have tried to show, a deeper and 
more spiritual conception of property. The rich man's 
real wealth, what is it ? Not his money ! He is a poor 
man to the end if he has nothing except that. And yet 
it is something associated with his money. It is some- 
thing which his money may give him peculiar opportu- 
nities to win and keep. It is something which came to 
him in the slow accumulation of his money. It is a 
character into which enter those qualities, independence, 
intelligence, and the love of struggle, which are the qual- 
ities that make true and robust manliness in all the 
ages and throughout all the world ; independence, or 
what the poet calls " the sweet sense of providing," the 
joy of self-support; intelligence, or the trained quick- 
ness to discern what is the true nature and what the true 
relations of the things about him ; and love of strug- 
gle, the capacity of buoyant hope and of delight in the 
exercise of powers against resistance, — these are the 
substance, the heart, the core, of the rich man's privi- 
lege. And men are coming more and more to feel that 
the rich man does not do his duty by the poor man, the 
rich class does not really take of its own and give it to 
the poor class, unless by some outflow of itself it gives 
these qualities, and sends a perpetual stream of inde- 
pendence, intelligence, and struggle, down through the 
social mass, making the spiritual privileges of those who 
are living on the heights of life the possession and in- 
spiration of the waiting, unsuccessful, discouraged souls 
that lie below. 

And then, at once, one thing is evident, that this 
makes charity a far more exacting thing than it can be 
without such an idea. It clothes it in self-sacrifice. It 



CHRISTIAN CHAKITY. 343 

requires the entrance into it of a high motive. I may 
feel it well to give a poor man money, or even to train him 
in the decencies of life, or even to give him knowledge, 
from very low motives ; merely to save myself from im- 
portunity, merely that he may not offend my fastidious 
taste, merely that he may become less dangerous. But 
before I seriously undertake to make of him an inde- 
pendent, intelligent, struggling brother-man, to wake 
him from his torpor, to set him on his feet, to kindle in 
his soul that fire which keeps my own soul full of light 
and warmth, I must have something more than the 
impulse of a wise economy. This needs a sympathy 
which makes his life, with all its needs and miseries, my 
own. It demands of me to wrestle with his enemies, 
to undertake a fight for him which he is not yet ready to 
undertake himself, to sacrifice myself that I may make 
his true self live. 

Perhaps this is more clear if we see how it is illus- 
trated in all the profoundest gifts which men are called 
on to give to their fellow-men. The most sacred gift 
that any of us can try to give to his brother is Christian 
faith ; and I am sure that if you have ever thought of it 
at all carefully, you have seen that just in proportion to 
the profoundness of the faith which you yourself pos- 
sessed, has always been the profoundness of the act of 
giving it, and also the degree of struggle and effort and 
self-sacrifice with which the gift has been bestowed. 
Here too the conception of property measures the con- 
ception of charity. If faith to you meant nothing 
deeper than the holding of certain well-proved proposi- 
tions, then the giving of faith to your brother-man 
meant only the presentation of those propositions to his 



344 CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 

intellect, all backed up with their unanswerable proof. 
And it was wholly an easy thing to do. You glibly 
told the argument wdiich you had learned, and all your 
pride of partisanship stood eagerly waiting to see assent 
dawn in your pupil's face. But if faith by a far deeper 
experience had come to mean for you something far 
more profound, the resting of your soul on the soul of 
your Father, the full entrance of your nature into God's 
nature by grateful love, then how much greater was the 
boon you had to give. How much more earnest was 
your struggle with your disciple till he had received it. 
How you used the w^ell-proved propositions only as the 
means of bringing these two hearts together, God's and 
God's child's. How you wrestled and watched and 
prayed. How at last, when your friend really w^as a 
believer, your joy was all generous and noble ; fully and 
thankfully content that he should be a sharer of your 
faith, even though his views of truth and the proposi- 
tions in which he stated it were very different from 
yours. 

There is a more sacred illustration even than this. 
We all think of God as giving of that which is His own 
to us who are His children. Is it not true that accord- 
ing to our conception of God's ownership will always be 
our thought of His bestowal ? Property and charity 
once more will correspond. If when we think of God, 
the great privilege of His perfect life seems to us to be 
that He is perfectly happy, that He can never suffer, 
then the great gift of God will seem to us to be mere 
happiness, immunity from suffering, reward to all His 
servants who have served Him well, and simply for- 
giveness, simply the lifting off of penalties from the 



CHEISTIAN CHARITY. 345 

sinners who have repented of their sins. And to such 
gifts we cannot well attach the thought of sacrifice with- 
out the shaping of some half-commercial theory such as 
long clung about the truth of Christ's atonement and 
still haunts that truth to the bewilderment of many 
earnest minds. But if, upon the other hand, God's 
great possession is His holiness, if the sublime preroga- 
tive of His perfection of which we always think is that 
He never sins, then His great gift will be holiness too. 
Not safety from punishment but purity from wicked- 
ness will be the promise which shines like a star before 
our spiritual hope. And in the giving of that supreme 
glory of His glorious life we can well see, by dim illus- 
trations that our own life furnishes, how there not 
merely may be but there must be sacrifice. The mys- 
terious intrusion of sorrow for ns into the divine life, 
the surrender of incarnation, the tragedy of crucifixion ; 
all this becomes not clear of mystery, but full of gra- 
cious possibility, as soon as, with the highest conception 
of God's possession, we have mounted to the completest 
idea of His salvation. 

This last illustration gives me the chance to say dis- 
tinctly what I have already intimated once or twice, 
that the deeper conception of benefaction, which will 
not rest satisfied with anything short of the imparting 
of character, still does not do away with the inferior 
and more superficial ideas. It uses the lower forms of 
gift still as means or types or pledges. When I think 
of God as the giver of goodness, I am led not less but 
all the more to thank Him for the forgiveness of my 
sin. But that forgiveness is not any longer an end in 
itself. It has become to me the means, the figure, the 



346 CHRISTIAN CHAEITY. 

promise, of the holiness, His own holiness, for which He 
is trying to melt a way into my soul. When I try to 
bring my friend to a spiritual faith in God, the argu- 
ments with which I try to meet his objections become 
not less but more dignified and urgent because their 
value lies not in themselves but in the new spiritual 
condition for which they are laboring to make a way. 
And so when you or I or a whole charitable community 
conceives the profounder thought that the poor are not 
merely to be rescued from starving but inspired and 
built up into self-support, intelligence, and the love of 
struggle, there is in such a new conviction no abandon- 
ment of the necessity of money-giving. The giving of 
money becomes * all the more necessary. Only it is 
ennobled by being made the type of a diviner gift which 
lies beyond. Sometimes the higher gift may be so 
directly given that the type is needless. Sometimes the 
modern benefactor may say like Peter at the temple- 
gate, " Silver and gold have I none, but in the name of 
Jesus rise and walk ; " but the rule of life will be that 
the type is needed for the full work of the reality ; and 
money must be given all the more richly and willingly, 
the more transparent it becomes to show the higher 
purpose lying in behind it. 

We live, as I have said already, in the midst of a cer- 
tain dissatisfaction with the methods of charity which 
have long prevailed ; in the midst of much misgiving 
and wondering whether perhaps the work of almsgiving 
men and women and of charitable societies, which have 
poured out their benefactions freely in our great com- 
munities, has not often done more harm than good. All 
thoughtful citizens have welcomed the effort after a more 



I 



CHRISTIAN CHAPJTY. 347 

systematic and intelligent administration of charity of 
which we have heard much, and of whose development 
we hope to see a great deal more. We need to remem- 
ber certain things as we think about it. First, that all 
true organization helps spontaneity and does not hinder 
it. The organization which discourages spontaneous ac- 
tion, and does not, by due direction and suggestion, simply 
reduplicate its force and so encourage it, is worse than 
worthless. And second, that the effort to help the poor 
not merely out of starvation, but into character and the 
self-support which can only come by character, is not a 
relaxing but a tightening of the demands of charity. It 
makes charity harder and not easier. It calls for pro- 
founder sympathy, and for more sleepless vigilance. To 
the charitable man or the charitable community which 
keeps both these truths in mind, w^hich is on its guard 
perpetually against the hardening of charity into a ma- 
chine, and expects perpetually the opportunity of com- 
pleter and completer entrance into the lot of the suffering 
and needy, to such an one there looms up, I think, now 
in the distance, a noble vision of what the relations of the 
rich and poor in a great city may become. It is a vision 
which has the same charm of soberness, thoughtfulness, 
thoroughness, and infinite promise, that belongs to what 
we may call the more rational and lofty Christian faith 
which it seems as if God was opening before His church. 
It is a vision not of money recklessly flung abroad in un- 
discriminating relief of suffering ; nor, on the other hand, 
of tight, hard machinery, grinding forth help without 
sympathy, from between the wheels of inflexible organiza- 
tion ; but a vision in whose fulfilment there shall be some- 
thing like the true kingdom of God on earth, in which no 



348 CHEISTIAN CHARITY. 

soul shall be satisfied until, to some other soul which is 
personally its care it shall be giving the best that God has 
given it, making use of all lower gifts richly and freely, 
but always with the purpose, never lost sight of, never 
forgotten, of bringing character, the life of God, into the 
life of one more of His children. 

AVe, to whom the question comes of what the rich man 
may and can do for the poor man, live in the midst of a 
great city ; a city ever growing greater and greater, and 
putting on more and more the character which belongs 
to those vast aggregations of humanity which, according 
to some men's judgment, are the frightful plague-spots 
of the earth, and, in the judgment of other men, are the 
crowns and glories of our planet. We have the poor man 
before us not in the mere fact of his poverty, but as his 
poverty is always being bruised and embittered and ex- 
asperated in the life of a great city. Let us think for a 
moment what it must be to be poor here in the midst of 
these roaring and insulting streets; how different the 
burden of poverty must be here in the city from what 
it is when a man has to carry it through quiet country 
lanes, with all the sweet sights and sounds of nature in 
his eyes and ears. Then w^e shall see something of the 
wisdom and profoundness which the problem of charity 
demands here in the city. The city poor man then, re- 
member, lives in the sight of wealth which is continually 
changing hands. There is no settled fixedness of prop- 
erty. Where one man flourished yesterday another man 
is flourishing to-day, and the old prosperity has disap- 
peared. Not in the city, as in the country, do the same 
households hand their houses down for generations as 
if they had some chartered privilege of security with 



CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 349 

which no upstart aspirant must interfere. In the midst 
of this pervading atmosphere of chance, of opportunity, 
the poor man walks with a perpetually disappointed 
hope which never can entirely die out in calm despair ; 
restless with a continual wonder that, in all this cease- 
less change, none of the shifting fortune ever falls to 
him. AVhat condition of things could be more fit to 
create discontent which never ripens into energy, a move- 
ment which can only fret and chafe. The city poor 
man seems to live on the brink of a Bethesda which the 
angel is forever troubling, but into which he learns 
to peevishly complain that there is no man to put him 
down at the right moment. Its waters seem to mock 
and taunt him as they sparkle inaccessible in the sun- 
light. 

And again, the poor man in a great city sees wealth 
and wealthy men as a class. He does not know them 
as individuals. And a class of men, known only as a 
class, keeps all the exasperating qualities of personality, 
but loses the graciousness which belongs to individual 
relations. The political party which we hate is always 
more hateful to us than the men of w^iom it is com- 
posed. The religious sect which we despise is always 
more despicable to us than its individual believers. 

And yet again, the city poor man is very apt to live 
in squalid circumstances which, while they make him 
wretched and embittered, disable at the same time the 
powers of repair, and beget a dull and heavy careless- 
ness. To the poor man in the country, however poor he 
is, the bright skies at least bring unconscious influences 
of order ; and the fields, with their circling seasons, will 
not let him totally forget that there is such a thing as 



350 CHKISTIAN CHARITY. 

beauty. You cannot shut out the horizon with its hope 
from the most hopeless soul. He little knows how al- 
most absolutely indestructible is the elasticity of the 
human soul, who thinks that poverty in the city loses 
nothing in being condemned to live in the midst of per- 
petual disorder, ugliness, and dirt. 

And still, with all his enforced hopelessness, the stir 
of the great city keeps the mind of the poor man in its 
midst alive, awake. He never can become as torpid as 
the country clown. There is no opiate for him in the 
thin and eager air. He must lie upon his rack with 
senses all acute and active. 

And yet, once more, the poor man finds himself of 
necessity made a servant and contributor to the very 
wealth which overbears him, and whose existence often 
seems to him an insult. In the complex existence 
where he lives, he cannot draw his life apart and till his 
little plot of earth and disregard the wealth which he 
cannot possess. He has to build up fortunes which are 
not his own. He seems to be the rich men's creature, 
used for their purposes as long as they require him ; 

" And having brought their treasure where they will, 
Then take thej^ down his load, and turn him oflf, 
Like to an empty ass, to shake his ears 
And graze in commons." 

And then, to name only one circumstance more, if, as 
so often is the case, the poor man in the city is one who 
once was prosperous, he is kept sore always by having to 
live in the presence of his old prosperity. He meets 
his old proud footprints stamped in' the familiar streets. 
The ghost of w^hat he used to be insults him everywhere. 
The memory of other days intensifies each misery. He 



CHRISTLVN CHARITY. 351 

cannot draw a curtain of forgetfulness about his altered 
lot, and fall asleep in dull content. 

Now put all these conditions together in your mind, 
and then think what a tumult of unrest, of hopeless, 
blind, unreasonable, disorderly repining and complaint 
the poor man of the city carries in his heart. He does 
not analyze it into its elements, as I have tried to do, 
but it is all there; far more terrible in its unanalyzed 
completeness than any such enumeration of its elements 
can describe. He is no man of our imaginations, no 
mere lay-figure for a sermon. He is real. You meet him 
every day. His is the face that looks moodily at you as 
you hurry by him on the sidewalk, or throw the street's 
mud from your carriage wheels upon his coat. His is 
the hand that rings your door-bell in the dusk ; and his 
the voice that whines and cringes to you in your hall, 
and curses you as he goes down your steps, with the 
memory of your glowing comfort before his eyes, and 
your quiet assurance that you have no money to give 
him in his ears, and the leaden load of wretchedness 
and disappointment heavier than ever at his heart. His 
is the house you hurry by in some back street, and 
wonder how a man can live in such a place as that. 
And ! be sure there do come to him hours when that 
horrible home seems to him every whit as hateful as it 
does to you. He is no fancy. He is terribly real. The 
streets reproach him with their boisterous prosperity and 
arrogant wealth. To us those streets are sympathetic. 
To prosperous men, full of activity, full of life, the city 
streets, overrunning with human vitality, are full of a 
sympathy, a sense of human fellowship, a comforting com- 
panionship, in all that mass of unknown and, as it were, 



oo2 CHEISTIAN CHARITY. 

generic men and women, which no utterance of special 
friendship or pity from the best-known lips can bring. 
The live and active man takes his trouble out into the 
crowded streets and finds it comforted by the myste- 
rious consolation of his race. He takes his perplexity 
out there, and its darkness grows bright in the diffused, 
unconscious light of human life. But when activity 
beats low and life has lost its buoyancy, when the 
wretched man is miserably and desperately poor, then 
the streets and the crowds are no longer sympathetic; 
then the great sea which used to heave the strong ship 
on, whether it would go or no, opens its depth and drowns 
the broken wreck. Ah, how little do w^e know of how^ 
the great full city which is always enticing and encour- 
aoins^ and exhilarating^ us, is mockino' and beatinsj down 
and treading under foot some poor brother wdio walks 
along the pavement by one side. 

What can we do about it, do you say ? Ah, that is 
the question that our charity and charitable people are 
just coming to see that they must answer. Thank God, 
they are learning to look deeper for their answer than 
they have ever looked before. They will find the an- 
swer gradually. Some time or other they will find it 
perfectly. I certainly am not so foolish as to think 
that I can give it ready-made here in the hurried end 
of a sermon. Enough if I have set any of you to think- 
ing that it must be found, and that the finding of it is 
no easy task. 

But one or two things let me say before I close, that 
I may not seem to have spoken wholly unpractically. 
The first thing that men must do in order that they may 
really, thoroughly relieve the poor, is to profoundly 



CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 353 

recognize that there can be no complete and permanent 
relief until not merely men who have money shall iave 
given it to men who have no money, but until men 
who have character shall have given it to men who are 
deficient in that last and only real possession. Not 
till you make men self-reliant, intelligent, and fond of 
struggle, fonder of struggle than of mere help, — not till 
then have you relieved poverty. . If you could give every 
poor man in this town of ours a house, a wardrobe, and 
a balance in the bank to-morrow, do you think there 
would not be poor men and rich men here among us 
still ? There must be, so long as there are some men 
with the spirit of independence, the light of intelligence, 
and the love of struggle ; and other men who have none 
of those things, which make the only true , riches of a 
manly man. And the second thing is this : the rich men 
of our community must be truly rich themselves, or they 
can have nothing worth giving to the poor ; nothing with 
which they can permanently help their poorer brethren. 
Only a class of men independent, intelligent, and glory- 
ing in struggle themselves, can really send independence, 
intelligence, and the dignity of struggle, down through a 
whole city's life. This is the reason why your selfish 
and idle rich man, who has neither of these great hu- 
man properties, does nothing for the permanent help of 
poverty. The money which he gives is no symbol. It 
means nothing. O let us be sure that the first necessity 
for giving the poor man character is that the rich man 
should have character to give him. 

And then, lastly, the rich men, rich in character, must 
know that -no man can give character to other men 
without self-sacrifice. Labor, personal effort, personal 

23 



354 CHRISTIAN CHARITY. 

intercourse with the poor, these must come in before 
the work can be done. You cannot do your duty to 
the poor by a society. Your life must touch their life. 
You try to work solely by a society, and what does it 
come to ? Is it not the old story of the book of Samuel ? 
The traveller appeals to you, and you spare to take of 
your own thought and time and sympathy to give to 
the wayfaring man that is come to you. They are 
too precious. You say : " There is thought, time, sym- 
pathy, down at the charity bureau to which I have a 
right by virtue of a contribution I have made. Go 
down and get a ticket's worth of that/' 

The poor are always with us. The wayfarers come 
to us continually, and they do not come by chance. 
God sends them. And as they come, with their white 
faces and their poor scuffling feet, they are our judges. 
Not merely by whether we give, but by how we give and 
by what we give, they judge us. One man sends them 
entirely away. Another drops a little easy, careless, un- 
conscientious money into their hands. Another man 
washes and clothes them. Another man teaches them 
lessons. Thank God there are some men and women 
here and there, full of the power of the Gospel, who 
cannot rest satisfied till they have opened their very 
hearts and given the poor wayfaring men the only 
thing which really is their own, themselves, their faith, 
their energy, their hope in God. Of such true charity- 
givers may He who gave Himself for us increase the 
multitude among us every day. 



XXI. 

THE MARKS OF THE LOED JESUS. 

**rrom henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus." — Galatians vi. 17. 

A MAN who is growing old claims for himself in 
these words the freedom and responsibility of his own 
life. He asks that he may work out his own career 
uninterfered with by the criticism of his brethren. He 
bids them stand aside and leave him to the Master 
whom he serves and by whom he must be judged. How 
natural that demand is ! How we all long at times to 
make it ! How every man, even if he dares not claim 
it now, looks forward to some time when it must be 
made. He knows the time will come when, educated 
perhaps for that moment by what his brethren's criti- 
cism has done for him, he will be ready and it will be 
his duty to turn aside and leave that criticism unlistened 
to and say, " From henceforth let no man trouble me. 
Now I must live my own life. I understand it best. 
You must stand aside and let me go the way where 
God is leading me." When a man is heard saying that, 
his fellow-men look at him and they can see how he is 
saying it. They know the difference between a wilful 
and selfish independence, and a sober, earnest sense of 
responsibility. They can tell when the man really has 
a right to claim his life ; and if he has, they will give it 



356 THE MAEKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

to him. They will stand aside and not dare to inter- 
fere while he works it out with God. 

This was St. Paul's claim, and he told the Galatians 
what right he had to make it. " From henceforth let 
no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of 
the Lord Jesus." It is the reason for his claim of in- 
dependence that I want to study with you. " I bear in 
my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." He was grow- 
ing an old man. Anybody who looked at him saw his 
body covered with the signs of pain and care. The 
haggard, wrinkled face, the bent figure, the trembling 
hands ; the scars which he had worn since the day when 
they beat him at Philippi, since the day w^hen they 
stoned him at Lystra, since the day when he was ship- 
wrecked at Melita ; all these had robbed him forever of 
the fresh, bright beauty which he had had once when he 
sat, a boy, at the feet of old Gamaliel. He was stamped 
and marked by life. The wounds of his conflicts, the 
furrows of his years, were on him. And all these wounds 
and furrows had come to him since the great change of 
his life. They were closely bound up with the service 
of his Master to whom he had given himself at Damas- 
cus. Every scar must have still quivered with the 
earnestness of the words of Christian loyalty which 
brought the blow that made it. See what he calls these 
scars, then. '' I bear in my body the marks of the Lord 
Jesus.'' He had a figure in his mind. He was think- 
ing of the way in which a master branded his slaves. 
Burnt into their very flesh, they carried the initial of 
their master's name, or some other sign that they be- 
longed to him, that they were not their own. That 
mark on the slave's body forbade any other but his own 



THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 357 

master to touch Mm or compel his labor. It was the 
sign at once of his servitude to one master and of his 
freedom from all others. So St. Paul says that these 
marks in his flesh, which signify his servantship to 
Jesus, are the witnesses of his freedom from every other 
service. Since he is responsible to his Master he is 
responsible to no one else. 'Trom henceforth let no 
man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the 
Lord Jesus." 

It is a vivid, graphic figure. I hope that we shall find 
that it may be as true of the life of any one of us as it was 
of the life of Paul. We see at once with what a pathos and 
a dignity it clothes the human body. It makes the body 
the interpreter of the spiritual life that goes on within 
it, the register of its experiences. A very clumsy and im- 
perfect interpreter of the soul indeed the body is, and 
yet we all know that it gets its real interest from what 
power of interpretation and record it does possess. A 
scar upon the face recalls some time of pain and peril, 
and lets us know of a soul that has undergone the disci- 
pline of danger. Whether the pain came and was met 
nobly or meanly, whether it was the peril of the soldier 
or the peril of the burglar, the dumb scar cannot tell. 
The quiet peaceful smile upon the face declares the soul 
at rest ; iiut whether the rest be idle self-indulgence, or 
the satisfaction of a soul at peace with duty, only he 
who reads behind the smile into its subtlest meaning 
is able to discover. Yet in its clumsy, halting way the 
outer is the record of the inner life. The -body tells the 
story of the soul. We bear in our flesh the marks of 
our masters. The hard hand of the laborer tells that he 
is the servant of unpitying toil. The knit brow of the 



358 THE MAEKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

merchant declares what master sits over him in his 
anxious office. The serious forehead of the thinker re- 
veals his service to his master, Truth. And when we lay 
a human body in the ground at last there is a reverence 
^ or a pity which starts within us as we see the coffin-lid 
close on the marks of noble or ignoble servantship which 
years have left written on the. face. 

This is the principle on which rests St. Paul's descrip- 
tion of himself. And now let us see how that same de- 
scription may be true of men to-day ; how they still may 
bear in their bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus, the 
very brands, as it were, which declare them to be His ser- 
vants, His property. Here is a man whose body shows 
the sisfns of toil and care. I will not read the lono- famil- 
iar catalogue. The whitened hair, the cautious step, the 
dulness in the eye, the forehead seamed with thought ; 
you know them all, you Avatch their coming in your friend, 
you feel their coming in yourself. What do they mean ? 
In the first and largest way they mean life. The differ- 
ence between this man and the baby, in whose soft flesh 
there are no branded marks like these, is that this man 
has lived. But then they mean also all that life has 
meant ; and life, below its special circumstances, always 
means the mastery in obedience to which all the actions 
have been done and all the character has taken shape. 
'' Who is your master ? " is the question that includes 
all questions. And if a man tries to push that question 
aside ; if he says, " Nay, but my life cannot be judged 
so, for I have no master," still he answers the question 
which he rejects. He answers it in rejecting it. He 
declares that he is his own master. And then he bears 
in his body the marks of himself; the faded colors and 



THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 359 

the scars mean only wilfulness and selfishness. But 
now suppose that life has meant for that man, from the 
beginning, the claiming of his soul by a higher soul ; sup- 
pose that every new experience has seemed in its heart, 
its meaning, its spirit, to be only a little closer overfold- 
ing and embracing of the will by the Supreme Will ; 
suppose that as the result of all, as the blended and 
completed issue of all this living, the life is Christ's life, 
uttering His wishes, seeking His purposes, filled and 
inspired by His love, reckoning its vitality by the de- 
gree of conscious and realized sympathy with Him ; sup- 
pose all this, and then it will be true that every outward 
^sign in which those inward experiences are recorded 
will become a mark of the Lord Jesus, a sign of that 
occupation of the nature by His nature, of the owner- 
ship of the man by Him, which is what it has meant 
for this man to live. 

For instance, here among the white careworn features 
there are certain lines which tell, beyond all misunder- 
standing, that this man has struggled and has had to yield. 
Somewhere or other, sometime or other, he has tried to do 
something which he very much wanted to do, and failed. 
As clear as the scratches on the rock which make us 
sure that the glacier has ground its way along its face, 
so clearly this man lets us know that he has been 
pressed and crushed and broken by a weight which was 
too strong for him. What was that weight ? If it were 
only disappointment, then these marks are the marks 
of simple failure. If the weight were laid on him as 
punishment, then these marks are marks of sin. If 
it were a weight of culture, then the marks are marks 
of education. If the weight was the personal hand 



360 THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

of the Lord Jesus Christ teaching the man that his 
own will must be surrendered to the will of a Lord 
to whom he belonged ; if the Lord Jesus Christ has 
been drawing him away from every other obedience 
to His obedience ; then these marks which he bears in 
his body are the marks of the Lord Jesus. It is as if 
a master, seeking for his sheep, found him all snarled 
and tangled in a thicket, clinging to and clung to by 
the thorns and cruel branches. He unsnarls him with 
all tenderness, but the poor captive cannot escape with- 
out wounds. He even clings himself to the thorns that 
hold him, and so is wounded all the more. When 
the rescue is complete and the master stands with his 
sheep in safety, he looks down on him and says : '' I 
need not brand you more. These wounds which have 
come in your rescue will be forever signs that you be- 
long to me. No other sheep will carry scars just like 
them, for every sheep's wanderings, and so every sheep's 
wounds, are different from every other's. Their pain 
will pass away, but the tokens of the trials through 
which I brought you to my service will remain. They 
shall declare that you are mine. You shall bear in your 
body my marks forever."- 

And then what follows ? Freedom ! " I bear in my 
body the marks of the Lord Jesus ; therefore let no man 
trouble me." I think that we have all seen how there 
are two classes among experienced and world-worn 
men. Some men with their scars and wrinkles and 
wounds grow timid, cringing, and spiritless. Their only 
object seems to be to get through the rest of life with 
as few more shocks and blows as possible. They apolo- 
gize for living. They try to keep out of other 'men's 



THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 361 

way and so are always open to their criticism, and 
slaves of their whims. Poor broken creatures they are. 
And then there are other men, whose hard experience 
of life has evidently lifted them away from any anxious 
care about what other men may think of them, given 
them an independent self-contained life, and made them 
free. What is it that makes the difference ? Does it 
not all depend on this : on whether the experience of 
life has given a man any new master whom he trusts 
and serves ; on whether the " marks in his body," the 
scars and bruises, are the ownership marks of any recog- 
nized and trusted Lord ; or whether they are only the 
unmeaning records of an aimless drifting hither and 
thither among the rocks ? The master may be more or 
less worthy. If there only be a master, the man is free 
from all other servitudes. His marks are signs of lib- 
erty. It may be only that he has made his -own pas- 
sions his lord. In self-indulgence and self-admiration 
he may have settled down to the mere service of him- 
self. But even in selfishness there is freedom. The 
man of fixed contented selfishness is liberated from a 
hundred cares about what other people think of him, or 
what they have a right to ask. But let the new master 
which life has given us be a principle, a cause, even a 
petty conscientious scruple, and then how clear the 
freedom from our fellows' tyranny becomes. '' From 
henceforth let no man trouble me, for I must do my 
duty ; I must work out my study ; I must maintain my 
cause." Very hard and sullen and cruel often grows 
the independence that is born of such a mastery. But 
now suppose that not one's self, and not some abstract 
cause, but the Lord Jesus is the Master to whom the 



362 THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

body's marks bear witness. The strongest and yet the 
gentlest of all masters ! The gentlest yet the strongest ! 
Then comes an independence which is complete and yet 
which has no bitterness. There is no crude and weak 
contempt of fellow-men, while yet there is a calm and 
complete assertion that no fellow-man must hinder or 
intrude upon our life. 

Indeed there is, in all the independence w^hich the 
Christian as the servant of Christ claims with reference 
to his fellow-men, this subtle element which always re- 
deems his independence from indifference or cruelty, — 
that the first duty which his new Master lays upon him 
is to go and serve and help those very fellow-men from 
whom he has plucked away his life, that he may give it 
completely to this loftier service. This is the noble 
poise and balance of the Christian life. Christ rescues 
the soul from the obedience of the world in order that 
in His obedience it may serve the world with a com- 
pleter consecration. The soul tears itself away from 
slavery to the world and gives itself to Christ ; and lo, 
in Him it serves the world for which He lived and 
died, with a devoted faithfulness of which it never 
dreamed before. Paul was never so busy working for 
men as in this very day when he cried out, '' Let no 
man trouble me." His cry was primarily a demand 
that no man should dare to question his apostolical 
commission, because Christ had adopted him ; but the 
more earnestly that he refused to let men question that 
deep transaction which lay between his soul and his 
Master's, so much the more completely did he give him- 
self up to the service of the men who he insisted should 
not be his judges or his lords. 



THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 363 

One principle you see lies at the bottom of all that 
we are saying, of all that Paul says in this verse. It is 
that no man in this world attains to freedom from any 
slavery except by entrance into some higher servitude. 
There is no such thing as an entirely free man conceiv- 
able. If there were one such being he would be lost in 
this great universe, all strung through as it is with obli- 
gations, somewhere in the net of which every man must 
find his place. It is not whether you are free or a ser- 
vant, but whose servant you are, that is the question. 
This was what Jesus said. "No man can serve two 
masters." "Ye cannot serve God and mammon.'' It 
was always a choice of masters to which He was urging 
men. The Son who was to " make them free so that 
they should be free indeed," was to be one to whom they 
should show their love by " keeping His command- 
ments." To know this truth is the first opening of the 
gates of life to a young man. It is not by striking 
off all allegiance, but by finding your true Lord and 
serving Him with a complete submission, that you can 
escape from slavery. " I will walk at liberty, for I keep 
Thy commandments," said David. This is the univer- 
sal necessity of faith, which is but the obedience of the 
complete man, soul as well as body. This is the ever- 
lasting and fundamental difference between two inquir- 
ing and seeking souls. One of them is looking for some 
door which shall lead out into absolute freedom. The 
other is asking with free-eyed earnestness for its true 
Master. Before the one there can be nothing but vague 
restlessness and endless discontent. The other shall 
certainly some day arrive at peace in believing and 
obeying. my dear friend, look for your master. Be 



364 THE MARKS OF THE LOED JESUS. 

satisfied with none until yon find Him who by His 
love and His wisdom and His power has the right to 
rule yon. Then give yourself to Him completely. Let 
Him mark you as His by whatever marks He will. 
Count every such mark a privilege. Find in His ser- 
vice the charter of your freedom. Eesist all other 
men's intrusion on your life, because your life belongs 
to Him. Be jealous for it as your Lord's domain. That 
is the real emancipation of 'the soul of a child of God, 
its total consecration to its Father. 

It is not only in. the duties of active life that a man 
receives the mark of Christ and enters into the liberty 
which He bestows. The same liberation sometimes comes 
by sickness and the incapacity for work. I can speak 
perhaps more clearly if I picture to myself some one 
here in my congregation on whom that calamity has 
fallen. For years you have been doing your part in the 
world. You have held your own. You have asked 
nothing, you have taken nothing, from your fellow-men. 
But suddenly, it may be, the blow has fallen on you. 
Sickness has come. You cannot work. You are dor 
pendent where you used to trust only in yourself. How 
terrible it is ! How it seems as if now all liberty were 
gone. You must stretch out your hand in your blind- 
ness for somebody to lead you. You must open your 
helpless mouth for somebody to feed you. Life seems 
all slavery and uselessness. What can release you ? If 
it could come to pass that by your pain you should be 
brought into a personal knowledge of Him who can con- 
sole your pain ; that by your weakness you could be 
brought to a personal reliance on His strength ; and so 
your pain and weakness could become to yoiu profoundly 



THE MAKES OF THE LOED JESUS. 365 

and inseparably associated with your allegiance to Him, 
— then see ! Would they not be transformed ? Still you 
must rest on others for what you would gladly do for 
yourself. But it would be no enfeeblement, no demor- 
alization of your life. The higher meaning of your 
pain would swallow up its lower meaning. The asso- 
ciation which it made for you with God would overrule 
the association which it made for you with your brethren. 
Through Him on whom it made you able to rely, you 
would be strengthened so that even those on whom you 
rested physically every day would feel your strength 
and spiritually rest on you. That would be freedom 
for you. 

Such sicknesses there are. Such we have sometimes 
known ; some men or women, helpless so that their lives 
seemed to be all dependent, who yet, through their sick- 
ness, had so mounted to a higher life and so identified 
themselves with Christ that those on w^hom they rested 
found the Christ in them and rested upon it. Their sick- 
rooms became churches. Their weak voices spoke gospels. 
The hands they seemed to clasp were really clasping theirs. 
They were depended on while they seemed to be most 
dependent. And when they died, when the faint flicker 
of their life went out, strong men whose light seemed 
radiant, found themselves walking in the darkness ; and 
stout hearts on which theirs used to lean, trembled as if 
the staff and substance of their strength was gone. A 
noble freedom certainly is this in which the arm that 
holds you up is really held up by you ; in which, while 
others think they are supporting you, you really are 
supporting them ; and this noble freedom may come to 
any weak and wounded life whose wounds and weak- 



366 THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

ness have become the siojns and tokens that it belono^s 
to Christ. 

But I must not seem to speak as if it were only the 
sick and wounded in the great army of life upon whom 
the great Captain's mark is set. There are too many 
young eager, hopeful lives here before me who belong in 
the very van of that army, and whose strength and health 
jBnd no worthy and sufficient explanation, unless we 
see in them the marks by which the Lord of our hu- 
manity would claim the choicest of our humanity for 
his own. Eemember what the Incarnation was. " The 
'Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." Then were 
the capacities of our human flesh declared. Then in the 
strong and healthy life of Jesus it was made known to 
what divine uses a strong body might be given. And 
since everything in this world properly belongs to the 
highest uses to which it may possibly be put, the strong 
human body was there declared to belong to righteous- 
ness and God. Thenceforward, after Jesus and His life, 
wherever human flesh appeared at its best, wherever 
a human body stood forth specially strong, specially per- 
fect and beautiful, it had the mark and memory of the 
Incarnation on it. It might be totally perverted. It 
might be given to the Devil. But, since the work that 
Jesus did, the life that Jesus lived in a human body, the 
human body in its fullest vigor has belonged to the 
high work which He did in it, the service of God and 
help of fellow-man. Its vigor is His mark upon it. Feel 
this, and then how sacred becomes the body's health and 
strength. It is no chance, no luxury. God means that 
in it you should do work for Him. By it He claims you 
for His own. He to whom God has given it, is bound to 



THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 367 

have strong convictions, a live conscience, and intense 
earnest purposes of work. 

Let a young strong man feel this and then he claims 
the proper freedom of his youth. " Let no man trouble 
me/' he says, '' for I bear in my body the marks of the 
Lord Jesus." I have tried to show you what those words 
mean when an old man says them out of the heart of 
his experience, with the bruises and scars of a hard life 
all over him. Even more solemn and full of meaning they 
are when a young man says them in the conscious vigor 
and full consecration of his youth. " You must not ham- 
per and restrain me,'' he asserts. " You must not turn 
me from my way to yours. You must not coldly crit- 
icise all that I try to do. You must not ask me to 
conform to all the traditions which your cautiousness 
marks out. You must let me risk something of repute, 
of fortune, of comfort, of life itself, to do my duty. You 
must not think me arrogant or self-conceited if I disre- 
gard both your anxiety and your sneers, and go the way, 
the new way, the strange way, that is clearly set before 
me." It is a noble thing when out of all the jealousy, 
out of all the anxiety and love of older men, a young 
man thus quietly and firmly claims his life ; but the 
nobleness only comes when he claims his life because 
Christ has claimed him, and because the full vigor and 
health in which he glories are to him marks of the Lord 
Jesus. To give one's life up timidly to the traditions 
that demand it on the one hand, and to assert one's 
independence in pure wilfulness on the other ; both of 
these are perversions of the purpose for which we were 
made. To insist that we must have our lives to our- 
selves, that their own power may be worked out freely 



368 THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

because we belong to Christ, that is the perfect scheme 
of existence, the sanctification of liberty, the transfigura- 
tion of ambition. 

It is not hard, I think, to believe that something of 
this sort of symbolic consecration, this consecration of 
the spirit under the body's symbols, may pass over into 
the other life, and so may last forever. St. Paul tells 
us that in heaven we are to have a spiritual body in 
place of the natural body which we wear here. The 
privilege of that spiritual body must be to express with 
perfect clearness the experiences of the spirit which 
will then be the master. And if the great experience 
of the soul must always be redemption, redemption re- 
membered in its beginning here, and ever going on to 
its completion through eternity, then certainly the body, 
which in some mysterious way will bear the record of 
that process, cannot fail to speak of Christ the Eedeemer. 
The unimaginable perfectness which will belong to every 
organ will forever utter Him. Every perfection will be 
a new mark of the Lord Jesus. And since each saint's 
belonging to the Savior must be forever different from 
every other s, each saint will have in his spiritual body 
his own "marks of the Lord Jesus;" the signs of how 
his Lord has claimed him with a discriminating love 
that is entirely his own, different from that with which 
every other saint in all the millions has been saved. 

In such a thought as that there opens before me all 
the social life of heaven. It is all liberty. No re- 
deemed spirit shall ever have the power or the wish to 
encroach a hair's breadth upon the development of the 
redeemed life in any other. Each shall grow free and 
straight towards its ov/n perfectness. And yet between 



THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 369 

these free lives, which never invade one another, there 
will always be the complete sympathy of a common 
dependence upon the one Source and Savior of them all. 
They will be all one, because they all belong to Christ, 
and yet the separateness of each shall be kept perfect 
because each is claimed with its own peculiar claim 
and marked with its own special mark. In all the 
solemnity of personalness and all the sweetness of broth- 
erhood, the celestial life shall flow along its ever deepen- 
ing way. 

And must we wait for that until we get to heaven ? 
my dear friends, in this world, full of crude self-asser- 
tion and of feeble conformity, in this society where men 
invade each other's lives, and yet where, if one man 
stands out and claims his own life, his claim seems 
arrogant and harsh and makes a discord in the feeble 
music to which alone it seems as if the psalm of life 
could be sung ; how sometimes we have dreamed of a 
better state of things in which each man's indepen- 
dence should make the brotherhood of all men perfect; 
where the more earnestly each man claimed his own 
life for himself the more certainly other men should 
know that that life was given to them. Must we wait 
for such a society as that until we get to heaven ? 
Surely not ! Even here every man may claim Jiis own 
life, not for himself but for his Lord. Belonging to that 
Lord, this life then must belong through Him to all His 
brethren. And so all that the man plucked out of their 
grasp, to. give to Christ, comes back to them freely, sanc- 
tified and ennobled by passing through Him who is the 
Lord and Master of them all. 

Tor such a social life as that we have a right to pray. 

24 



370 THE MARKS OF THE LORD JESUS. 

But we may do more than pray for it. We may begin 
it in ourselves. Already we may give ourselves to 
Christ. We may own that we are His. We may see 
in all our bodily life, — in the strength and glory of our 
youth if we are young and strong, in the weariness and 
depression of our age or feebleness if we are old and 
feeble, — the marks of His ownership, the signs that we 
are His. We may wait for His coming to claim us, as 
the marked tree back in the woods waits till the ship- 
builder who has struck his sign into it with his axe 
comes by and by to take it and make it part of the 
great ship that he is building. And while we wait we 
may make the world stronger by being our own, and 
sweeter by being our brethren's ; and both, because and 
only because we are really not our own nor theirs, but 
Christ's. Such lives may He give to us all ! 



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